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11:15am-12:45pm

Panel 3 (Red Salon/ Volksbühne)

New Nature Writing

With Esther Kinsky (DE) und Ulrike Draesner (DE).

Moderation: Gabriele Dürbeck

Today's nature writing combines one's perception of the natural environment, landscape, and terrain with description, introspection, and reflection by also incorporating the interventions and often toxic legacies of the human species. The panel is devoted to two current examples of nature writing characterized by the high sensory vividness and geo-poetic precision.

First, Ulrike Draesner's response to the perception of ice supposed Arctic silence and melting permafrost in her text "Radio Silence", a mixture of essay and poems with webs of intertextuality; then, Esther Kinsky's exploration of slate as a geological layer, building material, tool, metaphor, and text in her poetry collection Slates.

Both authors approach a physical nature that is characterized by stability, hardness, and permanence, the ice, the slate. In contrast to their insistence and constancy, both emphasize the variable, the slowly changing, the shaking of the marked and 'injured' landscape. They inquire into memory and remembrance and in many cases refer to photographs or texts by others.

The habitats of plants and animals are also woven into the depictions. Both authors experiment with the limits of language, seeking a new way of expression and imagery in print. In the panel, we will experience texts and images from the Slate Islands and the Arctic and hear about forms and possibilities of nature writing and landscape text.

Portrait

Ulrike Draesner lives as a freelance writer in Berlin and Leipzig. She made her debut in 1995 as a poet and has since published novels, essays, and more poetry. Her recent writing often deals with nature. In 2020, she received the Nature Writing Prize together with Esther Kinsky for her essay "Radio Silence." Since April 2018, Ulrike Draesner has been Professor of German Literature and Literary Writing at the University of Leipzig.

Titles:
•Radio Silence, 2020 (unpublished essay)

Book cover
Book cover

Esther Kinsky is a literary translator and author of prose and poetry who lives in Berlin. She has received several awards for her writing and translation work. For her text "FlussLand Tagliamento" she received the Nature Writing Prize in 2020 together with Ulrike Draesner.

Titles:
•Schiefern. Gedichte (Slates. Poems), 2020
•FlussLand Tagliamento (Tagliamento RiverLand), 2020