Terézia Mora

Terézia Mora in Berlin 2019 - press photos for the release of her novel On the Rope (2019)

- Stefanie Kreuzer | As of Nov. 2, 2021 -

Terézia Mora (*1971) will receive the Kassel Grimm Poetics Professorship in 2021.

Terézia Mora's fictional texts impress, as already pointed out in the context of the Büchner Prize award (2018), by "their eminent presence and lively linguistic art, which unites everyday idiom and poetry, drasticness and tenderness." Her textual worlds are populated by a cast of characters that often assembles oddballs, precarious existences, modern nomads, hapless loners, and whimsical, sympathetic strangers. Terézia Mora's storytelling is characterized by vivid character descriptions and visually arresting worlds. Likewise, self-reflexive moments and playfully experimental elements emerge, sometimes ironically breaking the narrated worlds. Examples include simultaneous narrative strands and perspectives placed side by side in the text, as well as the accompanying different individual reading directions, or even crossed-out words and graphically structured text arrangements.

As a prose writer, Mora has now published two volumes of stories and four novels. Her early story collection Seltsame Materie (1999) and the novel Alle Tage (2004) were followed over the course of a decade by a trilogy of novels recounting the simultaneously extreme and curious life of IT specialist Darius Kopp. The trilogy ranges from Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent (2009) to Das Un geheuer (2013) and Auf dem Seil (2019). The protagonist initially spends professionally successful and privately happy times in Berlin. When he is confronted with the suicide of his Hungarian-born wife, he experiences it as a blow of fate. He withdraws from his previous life and embarks on an aimless nomadic existence. With his wife's urn in his luggage, he sets off in search of her origins, traveling to Hungary and on through Eastern Europe. In the third part, he is finally stranded penniless as a casual laborer, tourist guide, and pizza baker in Sicily, before setting out for a new life back in Berlin with his pregnant, underage niece.

Like Darius Kopp, many characters in Mora's texts appear as quirky characters who more or less hold their own in their lives or even - like Darius's wife Flora - can no longer bear it. For example, Abel Nehma, the protagonist of Alle Tage, or the main characters of the title story from the collection Die Liebe unter Aliens (2015). Terézia Mora's narrative is rich in action, uses very different subjects - from the academic life of a retired Japanese professor to the description of contradictory feelings during a rape - and linguistically offers a wide spectrum of heterogeneous tones and stillages.

Prior to the Kassel Grimm Poetics Professorship, Mora held the Tübingen Poetics Professorship with Péter Esterházy in 2006/07 and the Frankfurt Poetics Professorship in 2013/14. In 2014 she gave the Salzburg Stefan Zweig Poetics Lecture.

In the run-up to the Kassel GPP event, a hr-2-kultur podcast (June 8, 2021) announcing Terézia Mora's guest professorship was produced, which also refers to the accompanying film SIE SAGEN IMMER TERÉZIA MORA (D 2021), directed by Thomas Henke.