Deutsches Haus at
NYU presents
Magnificent Strangeness: An
Evening with
Yoko Tawada and
Rivka Galchen
Friday,
February 27th,
2015
Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a reading by Yoko Tawada, currently the
DAAD Distinguished
Chair in
Contemporary Poetics in NYU’s
Department of
German, followed by a conversation between Yoko Tawada and the Canadian-American writer Rivka Galchen, introduced by
Alys George,
Assistant Professor at the Department of German at NYU. Yoko Tawada will read from Fremde aus der
Dose in German, and from her poetry in
English translation. In their conversation, Tawada and Galchen will focus on writing between languages and cultures, the perceptions, limitations and possibilities of language, and finally Tawada's "magnificent strangeness", as Galchen recently wrote in an article for
The New Yorker.
Yoko Tawada was born in
Tokyo, Japan in 1960, and first traveled to
Germany at the age of 19. Three years later she established permanent residency in
Hamburg. Written originally in
Japanese, a collection of Tawada’s stories and poetry was translated into German and made an appearance soon after in
1987 under the title Nur da wo du bist da ist nichts (Only there where you are there is nothing). Since then, Tawada has published numerous stories, poetry, essays, plays both in Japanese and in German, has established a celebrated career as a contemporary author, and is widely noted for her intercultural style of writing for which she has experienced an exceptional amount of attention.
Tawada has appeared in over 900 different readings in several countries since 1987. Among her publications are her novella Inu mukoiri (
The Bridegroom Was a Dog,
1991; translated
1998), which was awarded the
Akutagawa Prize in
1993, and Yogisha no yako ressha (
Suspects on the
Night Train), a series of linked stories, which also received the
Tanizaki Junichiro Prize in
2003.
In addition to her many Japanese literary awards, Tawada is the recipient of numerous prestigious German literary awards, including the Advancement in Literature Prize (
1990), the
Lessing Prize (1993), the
Adelbert von Chamisso Prize (
1996), and the
Goethe Medal (
2005). She has also been a writer in residence at several universities across the
U.S., including
Washington University (
2007),
Stanford University (2008), and
Cornell University (2008).
Yoko Tawada relocated to
Berlin, Germany in
2006 and resides there as a freelance writer.
Rivka Galchen was born in
Toronto but grew up largely in
Oklahoma, where her father was a professor of meteorology at the
University of Oklahoma and her mother, a computer programmer at the
National Severe Storms Laboratory.
Her writing, both fiction and nonfiction, has been published in The New Yorker,
Harper's, the
New York Times, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances (2008) was a finalist for the
Mercantile Library's
John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the
Canadian Writers'
Trust's 2008
Fiction Prize, and
Canada's Governor General's
Award, and was awarded the
William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Galchen's short-story collection,
American Innovations, was published in 2014 and has been longlisted for the 2014
Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Galchen lives in
New York, where she teaches writing at
Columbia University and is a Contributing Editor at Harper's.
Alys George is Assistant Professor in the Department of German at
New York University, where she has taught nineteenth- through twenty-first-century
German-language literature, culture, and film at NYU since
2011.
Magnificent Strangeness: An Evening with Yoko Tawada and Rivka Galchen is a DAAD-sponsored event.
Video recorded and edited by Laia
Cabrera & Co.
http://laiacabrera
.com/company
- published: 04 Mar 2015
- views: 509