Curtain up for book titles ready for promising translations! Our pitching sessions aim at connecting key partners of translation projects: Publishers in the region Asia-Pacific and in German speaking countries as well as translators. Just browse through book titles that have been pitched in one of our sessions – and find a match for your publishing program. We are happy to provide you with more details and to connect you.
Curtain up for book titles ready for promising translations! Our pitching sessions aim at connecting key partners of translation projects: Publishers in the region Asia-Pacific and in German speaking countries as well as translators. Just browse through book titles that have been pitched in one of our sessions – and find a match for your publishing program. We are happy to provide you with more details and to connect you.
Curtain up for book titles ready for promising translations! Our pitching sessions aim at connecting key partners of translation projects: Publishers in the region Asia-Pacific and in German speaking countries as well as translators. Just browse through book titles that have been pitched in one of our sessions – and find a match for your publishing program. We are happy to provide you with more details and to connect you.
Curtain up for book titles ready for promising translations! Our pitching sessions aim at connecting key partners of translation projects: Publishers in the region Asia-Pacific and in German speaking countries as well as translators. Just browse through book titles that have been pitched in one of our sessions – and find a match for your publishing program. We are happy to provide you with more details and to connect you.
2022
About the book
ISBN: 978-3-7518-0086-0
Publisher: Matthes & Seitz Berlin
Publication date: 18.08.2022
260 pages, bound with dust jacket
Giant dragonflies, chupa chups, a stolen meteorite in a psychedelic, increasingly hot Tyrolean summer: Prana Extrem tells of the longing to grasp the world and surrender to it at the same time.
On the Bergiselschanze in the Tyrolean winter sports metropolis of Innsbruck in early summer, the narrator Joshua and his partner Lisa meet sixteen-year-old Michael Stiening, an Austrian ski jumping talent preparing for the new season and his assault on the top of the world. In the training methods of his older sister Johanna, gravitation, inclusiveness and self-confrontation come together. When Joshua and Lisa move into the holiday flat in the siblings' house, a temporary community is formed, which is unexpectedly joined by Joshua's eccentric but caring grandma Suzet and, for a few weeks, little Tilde. And so, in this hot summer in this almost unreal place near the swamps where aloe vera grows in the Alps, a journey of self-discovery begins for all of them.
Prana Extrem is the new novel of the outstanding author Joshua Groß who is one the most interesting and intellectuelly restless authors of his generation. The smoothly paced novel is an attempt to depict the rapidly changing world in a multi-layered way; it is the venture to create space for a different togetherness through love, attention and humour; a book that tells of the success of deep connection, and a place that emerges as a magically sublime counter-space to our reality for the duration of the reading.
About the author
Joshua Groß, born in Grünsberg in 1989, studied political science, economics and ethics of text cultures. He has received several awards, most recently the Anna Seghers Prize 2019, the Hölderlin Förderpreis 2021, the Literature Prize of the A und A Kulturstiftung 2021 and a residency grant from the Literary Colloquium Berlin 2021. Matthes & Seitz Berlin published his works Flexen in Miami and Entkommen.
For further information please feel free to contact:
Dr. Andreas Rötzer
Göhrener Str. 7 | 10437 Berlin
T +49 (0)30 24356293
[email protected]
Website: www.matthes-seitz-berlin.de
2020
About the book
English title: The Riff-Raff
ISBN : 978-3-446-26562-2
160 pages
February 2020
English sample translation available
Nominated for the German Book Prize
Sold to Arab World (Alturjman), China (Yilin Press), Czech Republic (Prostor), Denmark (Palomar), English World (Bloomsbury), Finland (Huippu), France (Albin Michel), Greece (World Books), Israel (Hakibbutz Hameuchad), Italy (Keller), Netherlands (Nieuw Amsterdam), Norway (Solum Forlag), Russia (Text), Spain (Edhasa Argentina), Sweden (Lindelöws), Turkey (Ayrinti Yayinlari), UK/USA (Bloomsbury)
Josef and Maria Moosbrugger live with their children on the outer edges of a mountain village, far away from the other inhabitants. They are outsiders, marginalised, povertystricken – the riff-raff. It is the time of the First World War, when Josef is drafted into the army.
It is the time when Maria and her children are left behind and become dependent on the protection of the mayor. It is the time when Georg from Hanover comes to the area, a man who is not only beautiful and speaks High German, but who one day also knocks on Maria’s door. And it is the time when Maria gets pregnant with Grete, the baby of the family, with whom Josef will never speak a word: the mother of Monika Helfer.
She tells the story of her own origins, of a family that is only ever referred to by everyone as the “riff-raff”.
About the author
Monika Helfer was born in 1947 in Au / Bregenzerwald, and lives as a writer with her family in the Vorarlberg region of Austria. She has published numerous novels, short stories and children’s books. Her works have received numerous distinctions, including the Robert Musil Stipend, the Austrian Prize for Literature and the Solothurner Literature Prize. She received the 2021 Schubart Literature Prize of the city of Aalen for her novel Die Bagage (2020). Her most recent publications with Hanser are the novels Vati (2021) and Löwenherz (2022).
Press
»With just a few sharply defined pen strokes, we see this entire ‘riff-raff’ in a way that leaves a lasting impression.« Tom Wohlfarth, taz
»Monika Helfer tells her story in a wonderfully vivid, light, never selfpitying language. The characters grow dear to you in their humanity without being obtrusive.« Peer Teuwsen, NZZ am Sonntag
»Monika Helfer’s pared-down style and simplicity are captivating. A fantastic book!« Katja Gasser, ORF2
For further information please feel free to contact:
Claudia Horzella
Foreign Rights
Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG
Vilshofener Straße 10
81679 München
Germany
+49 (0)89 99830 532
[email protected]
Website: www.hanser-literaturverlage.de
2017
About the book
English title: Blueprint
ISBN: 978-3-446-25643-9
256 pages
July 2017
Full English manuscript available
Sold to Italy (Ugo Guanda), UK/US (Little, Brown)
Luise Schilling is young, inquisitive and has a promising future ahead of her. At the beginning of the turbulent Twenties, she arrives at Weimar’s Bauhaus University. She takes classes with professors such as Gropius and Kandinsky and throws herself into the dreams and ideas of her epoch. Luise has ambitions of achieving a great deal in life – but little of it has to do with paying homage to great men.
First, Luise falls in love with the dazzling art student Jakob, then in the politicized graphic artist, Hermann. But these are just two of the figures she meets during a heady period. From technology to art, communism to the avant-garde, populism to the youth movement, Luise encounters the social utopias that still shape us to the present day. As if looking at the headlines of today’s newspapers, what becomes clear is that the greater fight for freedom never stops at our own individual lives. Fast-paced and highly topical, Theresia Enzensberger’s story depicts a young woman in the throes of life: from brutal conflicts between right and left, to a pair of young lovers leaping into a river at night, almost one hundred years ago.
Press
»Blueprint is a wise novel in every respect – excellently researched, exciting and deserving of attention.« Annkathrin Bornholdt, NDR Kultur
»It is not a small feat to write a historical novel that brings together fictional and real characters while at the same time paving the way to the present. But this feat has been pulled off by Theresia Enzensberger.« Christoph Schröder, Tagesspiegel
»Blueprint reveals the inner contradictions and hypocrisies of the 1920s avant-garde and, in the same breath, those of today’s hip cliques. So, this impressive literary debut by Theresia Enzensberger is a story of liberation.« Julia Encke, FAS
About the author
Theresia Enzensberger was born in Munich in 1986 and lives in Berlin.
She studied Film at Bard College in New York and is a freelance journalist for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Zeitonline, Krautreporter and Monopol. In 2014, she founded the multi-awardwinning Block Magazin. In 2022 her new novel will be published by Hanser.
For further information please feel free to contact:
Claudia Horzella
Foreign Rights
Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG
Vilshofener Straße 10
81679 München
Germany
+49 (0)89 99830 532
[email protected]
Website: www.hanser-literaturverlage.de
2019
About the book
English title: Lucky Breaks
ISBN: 978-3-95757-776-4
Publication date: 2019
Sold to: Norway, Italy, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Russische Föderation, United States, United Kingdom
154 pages
Hardcover
Genre: Literary Novel, Essay, Narrative Nonfiction
English sample available
Russian original text available
Powerful, off-beat stories about women living in the shadow of the now-frozen, now-thawing war in Ukraine
Out of the impoverished coal regions of Ukraine known as the Donbass, where Russian secret military intervention coexists with banditry and insurgency, the women of Yevgenia Belorusets’s captivating collection of stories emerge from the ruins of a war, still being waged on and off, ever since the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. Through a series of unexpected encounters, we are pulled into the ordinary lives of these anonymous women: a florist, a cosmetologist, card players, readers of horoscopes, the unemployed, and a witch who catches newborns with a mitt. One refugee tries unsuccessfully to leave her broken umbrella behind as if it were a sick relative; a private caregiver in a disputed zone saves her elderly charge from the angel of death; a woman sits down on International Women’s Day and can no longer stand up; a soldier decides to marry war. Belorusets threads these tales of ebullient survival with a mix of humor, verisimilitude, the undramatic, and a profound Gogolian irony. She also weaves in twenty-three photographs that, in lyrical and historical counterpoint, form their own remarkable visual narrative.
Press
"Full of humour are the prophetic-absurd stories of these Ukranian women these mythological beings of everyday life. Belorusets lets the visible and the invisible swap places here - even the war has hidden in the park. Political theories, the Beckett absurdity of post-Soviet consciousness merge here into a unique voice unheard before." - Katja Petrowskaja
“In documenting the bizarre twists and fragmentary turns inherent throughout thesestories of loss and trauma, Belorusets draws on the grotesquerie of Nikolai Gogol’sfantasies and the absurdist gallows humour of Daniil Kharms, whose hauntingvignettes responded so well to the terror and seeming unreality of life in the SovietUnion. Yet against the present and looming risk of a Russian invasion of Ukraine,these combinations produce an especially unsettling awareness of the myriad ways inwhich imagination walks hand in hand with violent reality.” The Financial Times
“Belorusets’s stories work their way under your skin. A tender strength and Gogolian wryness emerge from “insignificant, trivial things”, like the inability to let go of an umbrella. Their inconclusive endings have a Chekhov-like knack of stepping off the page into a shifted new plane of survival and real, bewildered life.” The Times Literary Supplement
About the author
Yevgenia Belorusets is a Ukrainian photographer who lives between Kyiv and Berlin. Fortunate Fallings is her first novel.
For further information please feel free to contact:
Dr. Andreas Rötzer
Göhrener Str. 7 | 10437 Berlin
T +49 (0)30 24356293
[email protected]
Website: www.matthes-seitz-berlin.de
2015
About the book
English title: The invention of the Red Army Faction by a manic-depressive teenager in the summer of 1969
ISBN: 978-3-95757-077-2
Publication date: 2015
817 pages
Hardcover
English sample translation available
Gudrun Ensslin an Indian squaw made of brown plastic and Andreas Baader a knight in shining black armour? The world of the child narrator of this rousing novel, which resurrects the cosmos of the old FRG, is no less real than the political events that kept those years in suspense and on which the 13-year-old makes his very own rhyme. In this large-scale fantastic literary reconstruction of the western part of Germany, Frank Witzel has succeeded in building a hall of mirrors of history in the mind of an adolescent. Memories of post-war Germany, premonitions of the German Autumn and reflections on the present day take him further and further away from his environment. The dense narrative fabric is an explosive mixture of stories and history, world explanation, reflection and fantasy: a detail-obsessed kaleidoscope of moods from a world that, like the GDR, became history in 1989.
"This is not a seasonal product. This is a novel with a long-term effect." - Helmut Böttiger, Süddeutsche Zeitung
"Hardly any novel in recent years has placed form and content in such a compelling relationship as Frank Witzel's opus magnum. A clever and ambiguous novel on the knife edge of a political rupture." - Nicole Henneberg, FAZ
Awards
German Book Prize 2015
About the author
Frank Witzel, born 1955 in Wiesbaden is the author of numerous novels and essays. Besides his writing he works as an illustrator and a musician. For his novel The Invention of the Red Army Faction by a Manic Depressive Teenager in the Summer of 1969 he was awarded the German Book Prize 2015.
For further information please feel free to contact:
Dr. Andreas Rötzer
Göhrener Str. 7 | 10437 Berlin
T +49 (0)30 24356293
[email protected]
Website: www.matthes-seitz-berlin.de
2022
About the book
Publisher: Rowohlt Buchverlag
Release: 22.03.2022
384 pages
ISBN: 978-3-498-00296-1
English title: The Rage That Remains
– A powerful, poetic work that recognises and identifies some
painful aspects of our society.
– An author who fights with commitment for her themes and
material. And one who is heard.
– Recommended by New Books in German (Goethe Institute).
– A sample translation will be available soon.
What happens when a mother no longer wants to, or is unable to, go on?
Helene, mother of three children, gets up during dinner, goes out onto the balcony and throws herself to her death. The family is in shock. Suddenly everything that previously held them together has gone: love, care, security. Helene’s best friend Sarah, who had both envied and pitied Helene for her family, is dragged into a vortex of grief and chaos. Lola, Helene’s eldest daughter, searches for a way of coping with her emotions, and concentrates on the feeling that is strongest: anger.
Three women: one cannot do what life asks of a mother. The other two have to find a way to fill the void.
Their fates intertwine in Mareike Fallwickl’s stirring and clear-sighted novel about what it means to be a woman in today’s society.
About the author
Mareike Fallwickl was born in Hallein near Salzburg in 1983. She is a freelance author and lives with her family near Salzburg. Her literary debut Dunkelgrün fast schwarz was published in 2018 and nominated for the Austrian Book Prize as well the “Favourite book of the independents”. This was followed by Das Licht ist hier viel heller in 2019; the film rights to this book have been sold. She advocates literature with a focus on female narrators on various social media platforms. The Rage That Remains is her third novel.
For further information please feel free to contact:
Erica Lorenzoni
Contracts & Foreign Rights
Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, Kirchenallee 19, 20099 Hamburg
Tel. +49 (0) 40 / 72 72 - 240
Fax. +49 (0) 40 / 72 72 - 319
[email protected]
Website: www.rowohlt.de/verlag/rights
2021
About the book
Publisher: Rowohlt Buchverlag
Release: 19.10.2021
304 pages
ISBN: 978-3-498-00122-3
English title: So You Finally Found Us
– An exceptional literary debut.
– Exemplary and deeply, radically personal.
– Sample translation available.
A twelve-year-old boy tells his story: that of a life shaped by prison walls and classical music.
A child grows up in the early 1960s, in a town that is neither large nor small, in a middle-class family that spends a lot of time making music together. The father is a prison director. It hasn’t been that long since the end of the war, and the parents’ dedication to music and literature is an attempt to make up for what they call their lost years.
Yet the boy sees cracks everywhere in this orderly world. He listens attentively to the political debates between his older brothers and parents at the dining table. But he remains an observer. He increasingly takes refuge in the worlds offered by his imagination. This boy, whom the author sees as a distant brother, tells us about his life and, in so doing, discovers his view of the world. Every now and then, when the 73-year-old Edgar Selge speaks as himself, it becomes clear that the shadows of the generation that lived through the war reach all the way into our present time.
Edgar Selge’s narration is breathless, physical; it takes risks. It is filled with wit and musicality. Whether as Bach or Beethoven, Schubert or Dvořák, a military march or gospel, music wraps itself around the story like a second narrative, accompanying its unflinching push for freedom.
About the author
Edgar Selge, one of Germany’s foremost character actors, was born in 1948. He grew up in Herford in eastern Westphalia. His father was a prison director. After studying Philosophy and German Language and Literature in Munich and Dublin, and Classical Piano in Vienna, he completed his actor’s training at the Otto Falckenberg School in Munich in 1975. Selge has received numerous awards for his work. He is married to the actress Franziska Walser; the couple have two children. So You Finally Found Us is his literary debut.
For further information please feel free to contact:
Erica Lorenzoni
Contracts & Foreign Rights
Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, Kirchenallee 19, 20099 Hamburg
Tel. +49 (0) 40 / 72 72 - 240
Fax. +49 (0) 40 / 72 72 - 319
[email protected]
Website: www.rowohlt.de/verlag/rights
2021
About the Book
English title: Brothers and Ghosts
ISBN: 978-3-442-75802-9
304 pages
September 2021
btb Verlag
English sample translation available / Vietnamese sample available soon
Selected by New Books in German
Rights sold to: Iran (Hezar-e Qoqnoos)
Synopsis
She is 30 years old and her name is Kieu, like the girl in the most famous work of Vietnamese literature. But she prefers to go by "Kim" because it's easier in Berlin. In 1968, her parents had come to Germany from Saigon. She often wished for a family that didn't have to become German first, but simply was. The loss of her Vietnamese roots has never bothered her. On the contrary. Until she receives a message. On Facebook. From her uncle. Who has been living in California since he fled.
The whole family is supposed to meet for the reading of Kieu's grandmother's will. Kieu does not know these people. To her, the uncles and aunts are as unreal as the spirits of departed ancestors for whom her parents light a few incense sticks on Vietnamese New Year. It becomes a journey full of revelations – about her family, her origins and about herself.
Praise
"A groundbreaking work in German literature, Phams novel marks a seminal accomplishment that tells the dignified, thorough, and epic story of a Vietnamese family through clear, gem-like sentences and unflinching observations. With Pham’s vision, nothing is left unturned and all things are salvaged and lost at once. A courageous and bold achievement by a bright new voice." Ocean Vuong
“One of the most touching aspects of this excellent debut is seeing how Kim’s attitude to her origins slowly changes. […] A wonderful read.” Der Tagesspiegel
“What Phạm has to say about transgenerational trauma, losing your home and working out who you really are bears comparison to [...] Saša Stanišić.” Deutschlandfunk Kultur "Lesart"
About the author
Khuê Phạm is an award-winning Vietnamese-German writer. A graduate from the LSE, she has contributed to the Guardian and NPR before becoming an editor at the renowned German weekly 'Die ZEIT'. Interested in pop culture and politics, she has interviewed Anna Wintour, but has also co-written an investigation into the Essex lorry deaths, that earned her the nomination for Germany's version of the Pulitzer Prize. In 2012, she co-wrote a non-fiction book about second generation immigrants in Germany. In 2021, she published her first novel "Brothers and Ghosts", which is inspired by the story of her Vietnamese family. More at khuepham.de/english
For further information please feel free to contact:
Vera Kühn
Foreign Rights Assistant
Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe GmbH
Neumarkter Straße 28 - 81673 München
e-mail: [email protected]
Website: https://foreignrights.penguinrandomhouse.de/
2021
About the Book
English title: A Kind of Family
ISBN: 978-3-328-60194-4
368 pages
August 2021
Penguin Verlag
Sample translation available
Selected by New Books in German
Synopsis
We don't choose the times we live in nor the times that shape us. Neither did Lud and Alma. Lud, who was born in 1899, and his brother Wilhelm revere Bach and Hölderlin, and share the same unattainable ideals. Wilhelm, who joins the Nazi party early on, measures others according to its standards; Lud measures himself by them, which torments him for the rest of his life. Alma lost her parents when she was a child, and her godfather Lud – who is only a few years older than her – and his housekeeper become a kind of new family for her.
Lud is a pharmacology professor specialising in sleep and its induction, and while he spends his days at the university Alma is left home alone, unable to stop thinking about him. When he starts researching poison gas, he doesn't tell her about it. His struggle with his lofty ideals grows ever more desperate – for he can't get Gerhard, the man alongside whom he fought in the First World War, out of his head.
Taking us on a journey from the days of the German empire to National Socialism, the early days of the GDR and post-war West Germany, Jo Lendle's scintillating novel is the story of a family falling apart, of guilt, of the meaning of science, and of the subtle difference between sleep, anaesthesia and death. It is the story of a German family – which just so happens to be his own.
Praise
“It’s a novel about the many ways there are to comfort each other, even in the icy wind of the twentieth century’s many brutal decades; about the immense strength we can gain through solidarity; and about the opportunities, temptations and pitfalls of history.” Welt am Sonntag
“One of the smartest, most beautiful almost-family-sagas I’ve read in a long time.” WDR4 „Bücher“, Elke Heidenreich
“What’s impressive is how meaningfully and elegantly [Lendle] combines history, scientific facts, reflections on guilt and truth, and fiction into a panorama of an epoch.” Kölnische Rundschau
About the author
Jo Lendle was born in 1968. After studying cultural education and animation culturelle, he joined the German Literature Institute in Leipzig, edited the literary magazine Edit and has been a visiting professor and lecturer at several universities. He was awarded the Leipzig Promotion Prize for Literature in 1997. Since 2014 he is head of the Hanser publishing house.
For further information please feel free to contact:
Vera Kühn
Foreign Rights Assistant
Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe GmbH
Neumarkter Straße 28 - 81673 München
e-mail: [email protected]
Website: https://foreignrights.penguinrandomhouse.de/
2021
About the book
Publisher: Kiepenheuer&Witsch
Release: 09.09.2021
English title: My Mother’s Silver Fox
224 pages
ISBN: 978-3-462-00213-3
A real-life fate transformed into great literature: about a person who refuses to be broken and a son’s touching declaration of love for his mother
Recommended by New Books in German (Fall 2021)
English sample translation by Tess Lewis available
A great novel about origins and identity, about a merciless century in which the world was split between friend and foe.
Synopsis
In 1942, a Norwegian woman travels to Vorarlberg, Austria. She is pregnant and planning on starting a new life here with her fiancé, a Wehrmacht soldier. But for her and her son, Heinz, everything turns out differently – worse.
The only things Heinz Fritz knows for sure about his mother are the stages of her first long journey: Oslo – Copenhagen – Berlin – Munich – Hohenems. It’s detailed in a document he carries with him his entire life: a document from the SS Lebensborn association. The Norwegian woman has taken up with the enemy. And put her trust in the wrong man. For when she arrives in Austria, instead of welcoming her, her fiancé’s family turns her away. And she can’t go back to Norway either, because there she is now considered a collaborator…
By interrogating himself thoroughly and uncompromisingly, the novel’s narrator – the woman’s son – tries to solve the mysteries of his origins, to uncover the truth about his parents. A search for clues, at whose end everything changes yet again, revealing a second, “brighter” version of the dark story.
"'My Mother's Silver Fox' is a touching historical novel of identity-seeking, memory, love, and entanglement, and for all its tragedy, it holds many happy reading moments." - ORF
"'My Mother's Silver Fox' [is] an impressive portrait of people who are repeatedly pushed to the brink of despair - yet never stop hoping for relief." - Die Presse Spectrum
"We are dealing [...] with a virtuosity of storytelling that is unparalleled, setting out on the trail of the best-kept secret that every human being, as long as he or she is sane, unquestionably possesses: the imagination."- Wiener Zeitung
About the author
Alois Hotschnig, born in Carinthia in 1959, lives as a freelance author in Innsbruck. In 1992 he was awarded the Prize of the Province of Carinthia at the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition in Klagenfurt, in the same year his novel "Leonardo's Hands" was published, for which he received the Anna Seghers Prize. In 2000 his second novel "Ludwig's Room" was published. In 2002 he was awarded the Italo Svevo Prize. In addition to his novels, he has written several collections of short stories, most recently "Running Away is Easier While Sitting Down" (2009). He was awarded the Erich Fried Prize for "Maybe This Time" and the Gert Jonke Prize for his narrative work. The books have been translated into numerous languages. Alois Hotschnig also writes plays and radio plays.
For further information please feel free to contact:
Aleksandra Erakovic
Rights and Licences
Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG
Bahnhofsvorplatz 1
50667 Köln
Telefon: +49 (0) 221- 37685-56
Telefax: +49 (0) 221- 37 685-88
[email protected]
Website: www.kiwi-verlag.de