DAS ALPHABET BIS S

A woman writer at the height of her success and at the same time at the lowest point of her life – that is the starting point of Navid Kermani's great, long-awaited novel, which virtuously links the basic questions of our existence, gender, war and transience, with the most mundane.

A woman in her fifties: her marriage has failed, her mother has died, and suddenly her life plan as a public intellectual is called into question. For her husband was supposed to take care of the child and the household while she worried about the misery of the world. The books, which speak to her like living per- sons, offer support. But support is also provided by individual moments, however inconspicuous, which stand against the horror, the grief and the shame. Like his heroine, Kermani's book itself is a solitaire: novel and journal, essay and meditation, a celebration of literature. Something that has not been read before because, like all great books, it creates its own form.

Navid Kermani, born in 1967 in Siegen, lives in Cologne. For his novel »Dein Name«, published in 2011, he received the Kleist Prize and the Joseph Breitbach Prize. Since then, he has been awarded numerous other prizes, such as the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2015, the Hölderlin Prize of the City of Bad Homburg in 2020 and the Honorary Prize of the Austrian Book Trade in 2021. For the Kunstfest Weimar, he will read excerpts from his novel together with the great character actress Eva Mattes, who became familiar to television audiences for over 15 years as the Tatort commissioner from Constance. Roberto Ciulli, the author ́s friend and teacher, will also have a say in the conversation.