As part of the Zeitgeist Literature Festival, we are delighted to invite you to our second event at Kramers Bookstore.
At this evening, Alois Hotschnig (Austria) and Khuê Phạm (Germany) will read from their recent work and discuss how they use literature to disrupt conventional notions of the familiar and the strange, of self and other, of identity, intimacy, belonging and estrangement. Identity is pressure-tested to surprising and unexpected effect in these engaging and thought-provoking stories. The following Q&A session offers you the chance to engage more directly with the authors and their work. The evening will conclude with a book signing.
ABOUT MY MOTHER’S SILVER FOX
Heinz Fitz grows up with only a fragment of paper from the Nazi Lebensborn program to hint at his origins. His mother, a Norwegian woman, was rejected both in her homeland, where she was branded a collaborator, and in Austria, where her lover’s family turned her away. Now, years later, her son is determined to piece together the fragments of his origins. His quest reveals not only painful truths but also resilience and love. Inspired by real events, the novel reflects on memory, history, and whether the past can ever fully be known.
ABOUT BROTHERS AND GHOSTS
Kiều, who calls herself Kim because it’s easier for Europeans to pronounce, knows little about her Vietnamese family’s history until she receives a Facebook message from her estranged Uncle Sơn in America, telling her that her grandmother, her father’s mother, is dying. The two brothers haven’t spoken since the end of the Vietnam War. Minh, Kiều’s father, supported the Vietcong, while Sơn sided with the Americans. When Kiều and her parents travel to America to join the rest of the family in California for the funeral, questions relating to their past, to what has been suppressed, resurface and demand to be addressed.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Alois Hotschnig | Austria
Alois Hotschnig was born in Carinthia and lives in Innsbruck. His books, celebrated for their stylistic virtuosity and precision of observation, have won major Austrian and international prizes including the Federal Chancellery of Austria’s Literature Prize, the Italo Svevo Prize, the Erich Fried Prize, the Anton Wildgans Prize, the inaugural 2011 Gert Jonke Prize, and the ORF Radio Play of the Year Award, among others. These awards reflect Hotschnig’s mastery in examining universal concerns through the prism of an acute focus on the local.
Khuê Phạm | Germany
Khuê Phạm is an award-winning Vietnamese-German journalist and writer. A graduate of the London School of Economics, she worked as a producer for NPR’s Berlin bureau before becoming an editor at the weekly Die Zeit. She also contributed op-eds to The Guardian and USA Today. In 2012, she co-wrote “We new Germans”, a non-fiction book about second-generation immigrants in Germany. Her debut novel “Brothers and Ghosts” was published in English translation in Australia, Britain and the US. She is also a performer in “Kim”, the stage adaptation of her novel, which has been touring in Germany and Taiwan. Khuê is currently writing her second novel and has recently received a grant by the German Literary Foundation to support her work. A founding member of the PEN Berlin writer`s association, she is also a juror for the International Literature Prize, an award for global literature translated into German.
Images © Mercedes Blaas, Alena Schmick
Image © Festival Neue Literatur