Katja Lange-Müller liest aus „Drehtür“

Asta is stranded at Munich Airport after 22 years in the service of international aid organizations. She is mobbed away by her colleagues from the infirmary in Nicaragua, where she last worked, where she stands next to a revolving door and smokes. With each cigarette, Asta delves deeper into her past - and with each episode, the narrator varies a highly topical and existential topic: helping and its risks. In her latest novel, Katja Lange-Müller provides further proof of her great narrative skills.

Writer Katja Lange-Müller is the guest of honour in the literature section of Künstlerhaus Lukas in 2018. She is a stroke of luck for contemporary German literature because her books combine literary brilliance with a stunning sense of humour, according to enthusiastic literary critics. As the child of a leading GDR politician, at the age of 16 she was expelled from school for anti-socialist behaviour, did an apprenticeship as a typesetter and then worked as a picture editor for the Berliner Zeitung. After working for one year as a property manager for GDR television, she spent several years as an assistant nurse on closed psychiatric wards. From 1979 she studied at the Johannes R. Becher Literature Institute in Leipzig. In 1982 she spent one year studying in Mongolia, working at the Wilhelm Pieck carpet factory in Ulan-Bator. After her return to the GDR, she was an editor at Altberliner Verlag in 1983. In 1984 she left the GDR for West Berlin. Her work consists of stories and novels, which also incorporate experiences from her eventful life.  The list of her awards is long, beginning with the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1986, a Villa Massimo scholarship in 2017, and finally the Günter Grass Prize in 2017. Most recently, Böse Schafe and Drehtür (both Kiepenheuer Witsch, Cologne) appeared.

Moderation
Tilman Strasser, author and literary mediator
He studied creative writing in Hildesheim, writes for newspapers and television and moderates various reading formats in Cologne. He is currently the city writer of Hamburg for three months.

Published by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch from Cologne. An event of the Künstlerhaus Lukas

The complete programme and further information on the 17th Ahrenshooper Literature Days can be found at www.ahrenshooper-literaturtage.de.