Birgit Vanderbeke
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Birgit Vanderbeke held the Grimm Poetics Professorship at the University of Kassel in 2007. In the tradition of the namesakes of this visiting professorship, she has combined literary and linguistic reflection in a series of well-known literary figures.
Birgit Vanderbeke was born on August 8, 1956 in Dehme in Brandenburg. Her family moved from the GDR to West Germany in 1961. She grew up in Frankfurt am Main, where she later studied law and Romance languages and literature. She also spent several years in Berlin. Birgit Vanderbeke has lived in Languedoc in the south of France since 1993.
Image: Justus Nussbaum (Wikimedia Commons; CC-BY-SA-3.0)Her literary career began with a bang. In 1990, Birgit Vanderbeke, who was still unknown at the time, won the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt with her story Das Muschelessen. The theme of dysfunctional, sometimes grotesque family relationships continued to haunt her. The story Missing Parts was published in 1992, followed a year later by Good Enough (also premiered as a play in Bielefeld in 1999, directed by Tobias Derndinger). She experimented with various literary forms, including the crime novel(Ich will meinen Mord, 1995). Critics praised her linguistic virtuosity and her independent narrative style. Birgit Vanderbeke achieved great success in 1997 with Alberta empfängt einen Liebhaber, an ironically fractured love story. This was followed in 1999 by ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst, a novel with autobiographical elements in which Vanderbeke deals with a new form of existence in another country, the south of France. Other books include the novel Abgehängt (2000), Geld oder Leben (2003) and Sweet Sixteen (2005). Her heroines are very aware of their environment, independent, even rebellious women, whose fate she describes with a light hand, without concealing the abysses of their existence.
GPP event series with Birgit Vanderbeke
At the beginning of May, she took over the Grimm Poetics Professorship at the University of Kassel and gave an insight into her literary working methods and her current plans over three days. Three events took place:
Wednesday, May 9, 7-9 p.m., a lecture under the theme "To read or not to read". Thursday, May 10, 4-6 p.m., a seminar, and Friday, May 11, 7-9 p.m., a reading of her own texts.
All events took place in the Eulensaal of the Murhard Library on Brüder-Grimm-Platz.