Iris Hanika

“A clever, witty, and wild narrative constructor” – It is rare to hear such an imaginative tribute from a jury. Yet all of this is accurate. Thus, in Iris Hanika’s ninth novel, not only people are the protagonists, but also language, the metropolises of New York and Berlin as well as their gentrification.

Hanika varies the love story between the poet Sophonisbe and the much younger doctoral student Josh on the Greek myth of Echo, who has been robbed of her language and can only repeat the sentences of others, and Narcissus, who only sees himself.

Iris Hanika, born in Würzburg in 1962, was a regular contributor to the Berlin pages of the FAZ and ran a chronicle in the Merkur. In 2006 she received the Hans Fallada Prize, in 2020 the Hermann Hesse Literature Prize, and in 2021 the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for Echo’s Chambers. She has lived in Berlin since 1979.

As part of the 7th Literaturherbst Heidelberg.

The event will take place at the DAI Heidelberg and parallel online in the free dai HOME Livestream on our YouTube channel. Click here to go directly to the livestream.