This is a past event
The award winning German poet, writer, and translator, Ulf Stolterfoht, will be visiting Aberdeen University on Tuesday 11th October, and will read from two of his books: holzrauch über helsach (2007) and neu-jerusalem (2015).
Born in Stuttgart in 1968, Ulf Stolterfoht studied German and Comparative Literature in Bochum and Tübingen. Between 1998 and 2004 he wrote his acclaimed four-volume magnum opus of “specialized languages”. The experimental, metafictional style of his literary work follows in the tradition of Samuel Beckett and Oskar Pastior. He enjoys the transformation and collision of words as they are translated into a new language and the creation of poetry from coincidence. His lyrical work cultivates irony, punning, fragmenting, juxtaposing, distorting, and subjects everything to an almost compulsive humor. Through a method of recycling, his work draws together mismatched chunks of language from disparate sources - canonical works of literature to youth slang.
Stolterfoht has been awarded numerous prizes for his poetry (including the Christine Lavant Poetry Prize, the Anna Seghers Prize, the Alfred Gruber Prize, the Peter Huchel Prize and the Heimrad Bäcker Prize), as well as prestigious grants and fellowships. He also writes language-critical essays and is an award-winning translator of poetry. He is currently writer in residence at Queen Mary, University of London.
Stolterfoht will read from holzrauch über helsach, a poem about the formation and ruin of a subcultural population in the southern district of his hometown Stuttgart. The work deals with the milieu of the underground society: the language, the fights, the crime, the music. He will then introduce us to his latest work neu-jerusalem, which reimagines the biblical book of revelations, and parallels the 19th - 20th century emigration of radical priests to America with a religious, aesthetic and political resistance movement taking place in Berlin-Schöneberg.
Aberdeen University will be hosting Ulf Stolterfoht’s visit in conjunction with the visiting writer programme of the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). The reading will take place on Tuesday 11th October at 12 noon in the Sir Duncan Rice Library, 7th Floor, Meeting Room 1. The reading will be conducted primarily in German and is open to anyone with an interest in German language, literature and culture.
- Venue
- The Sir Duncan Rice Library - Meeting Room 1 (7th floor)
- Contact
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Tara Beaney, German Department