Iryna Fingerova & Matthias Nawrat

In the organizer's words:

Iryna Fingerova & Matthias Nawrat present their new novels "Zugwind" and "Das glückliche Schicksal".

"I have a daughter, a husband, a dental implant and cellulite on my butt." The protagonist who introduces herself so bluntly in Iryna Fingerova's novel "Zugwind" (Rowohlt; translation: Jakob Walosczyk) is Mira Zehmann, a general practitioner in Germany who comes from Ukraine. As war rages in her homeland, her practice becomes a point of contact for uprooted people from Ukraine who want more from her than prescriptions and pills. They are looking for comfort, a community in which they can come to terms with the horrors. But Mira feels the wind blowing through her and sets off for Odesa. A courageous and encouraging book, partly written in German for the first time by the author, who lives in Dresden.

Matthias Nawrat's novel "Das glückliche Schicksal" (Rowohlt) is also about European history: it is 1983 and the collapse of the socialist states is not yet in sight. Polish psychologist Wanda Karłowska travels from Krakow to Venice to meet sociologist Henryk Mrugalski, who has been living in exile there for years. The two give each other nothing and what begins as a conversation soon becomes more and more like an interrogation. Matthias Nawrat was awarded the Berlin Literature Prize for the novel. The jury particularly praised "the network of relationships behind the fragments of our reality, the invisible lines that lead from the past to the present".

Moderation: Dmitrij Kapitelman

Price information:

€ 16,-/12,-/ 6,- (livestream)