Sarah Kirsch
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The University of Kassel (GhK) has awarded its Brothers Grimm Poetry Professorship for the 1995/96 winter semester to the poet Sarah Kirsch.
The award of the Grimm Professorship in 1996 follows numerous honors that Sarah Kirsch has already received since she achieved early fame with her volumes of poetry Landaufenthalt (1967), Zaubersprüche (1973) and Rückenwind (1977).
Born on April 16, 1935 in Limlingerode/Südharz, after graduating from high school, working in a sugar factory, studying biology and studying for two years at the "poetry school" of the GDR, the Johannes R. Becher Literature Institute, she worked as a freelance writer from 1965. After her divorce from Rainer Kirsch in 1968, she lived in East Berlin and worked as a journalist, radio author and translator.
Image: Vera Stark (Wikimedia Commons | CC-BY-SA 3.0)She became a political border crosser in 1977 when she left the GDR in the wake of the protests against Wolf Biermann's expatriation and moved to West Berlin. Since 1983, Sarah Kirsch has lived and worked in Schleswig-Holstein, whose landscape and nature have since been the subject of much of her poetry.
The GhK is also hoping for a stronger connection to the literary scene with the changed selection procedure for the award of the Grimm Poetry Professorship. For the first time, the Department of German Studies has entrusted the nomination to a renowned critic and expert on contemporary literary life, who will also be responsible for presenting the new Grimm Poetry Professor: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (University of Göttingen), a proven expert in contemporary German literature, has been chosen for this task.
GPP event series with Sarah Kirsch
Sarah Kirsch read on January 16, 17 and 18 at the Gießhaus of the GhK. Heinz Ludwig Arnold, editor and founder of the literary journal Text und Kritik, was responsible for the introduction on January 16. The theme of the first evening in the overcrowded Gießhaus was "Von Haupt- und Nebendrachen". In a captivating, idiosyncratic lecture, in which she formulated her contradictory feelings with the literary audience, addressed her desire to write on "fine Tuscan paper", allowed autobiographical material to merge carefully into alienation and - not at all ready to be celebrated - barely noticed the enthusiastic applause at the end, presented herself as a poet of great charisma and persuasiveness. On January 17 [...] Sarah Kirsch spoke "Of poets and prose poets". On January 18, the evening event was preceded by a seminar with Sarah Kirsch before she read from her work.