Join Eva Menasse and her translator Charlotte Collins for a reading and discussion of her latest novel, Darkenbloom, about memory and amnesia in postwar Austrian society.
Reading, conversation and drinks reception
Friday 21 March, 7 - 8.30 pm
Long Room, Gonville and Caius College
Eva Menasse is an award-winning Austrian writer and public intellectual whose work explores the legacy of National Socialism and the Holocaust in postwar Austrian and German society. Collective memory and amnesia, contemporary Austrian and Jewish identities, and the hypocrisies and self-deceptions of modern life are skewered with precision and irony in her bestselling novels, Vienna [Vienna] (2005), Quasikristalle [Quasicrystals] (2013) and Dunkelblum [Darkenbloom] (2021), and in her short-story collections Läβliche Todsünden [Venial mortal sins] (2011) and Tiere für Fortgeschrittene [Animals] (2017), for which she won the Austrian Book Prize in 2017. She is also an accomplished essayist who has intervened in contemporary political and social debates in collections such as Lieber aufgeregt als abgeklärt [Better Worked Up than Mellow] (2015). Her most recent non-fictional essay, Alles und Nichts sagen [Saying Everything and Nothing] (2023), examines the profound social and political effects of the rise of digital discourses.
Reading, conversation and drinks reception
Friday 21 March, 7 - 8.30 pm
Long Room, Gonville and Caius College
Eva Menasse is an award-winning Austrian writer and public intellectual whose work explores the legacy of National Socialism and the Holocaust in postwar Austrian and German society. Collective memory and amnesia, contemporary Austrian and Jewish identities, and the hypocrisies and self-deceptions of modern life are skewered with precision and irony in her bestselling novels, Vienna [Vienna] (2005), Quasikristalle [Quasicrystals] (2013) and Dunkelblum [Darkenbloom] (2021), and in her short-story collections Läβliche Todsünden [Venial mortal sins] (2011) and Tiere für Fortgeschrittene [Animals] (2017), for which she won the Austrian Book Prize in 2017. She is also an accomplished essayist who has intervened in contemporary political and social debates in collections such as Lieber aufgeregt als abgeklärt [Better Worked Up than Mellow] (2015). Her most recent non-fictional essay, Alles und Nichts sagen [Saying Everything and Nothing] (2023), examines the profound social and political effects of the rise of digital discourses.
