Simone Lappert and Anna Miller
Photo: Björn Greve
Simone Lappert (*1985) studied literary writing at the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel. She lives and works as a freelance author in Zurich. Her debut novel ‘Wurfschatten’ was published by Metrolit in 2014 and nominated for the ZDF-aspekte Literature Prize and the Rauris Literature Prize. Her second novel ‘Der Sprung’ was published by Diogenes in 2019. It was nominated for the Swiss Book Prize and as the favourite book of the Swiss-German book trade. Simone Lappert is involved in various literary art projects. She is the president of the Basel International Poetry Festival, a jury member of the Basel Poetry Prize, co-founder of the transdisciplinary discussion series ‘Raum für Unsicherheit’, was the Swiss curator for the poetry project ‘Babelsprech.International’ and is a member of A*dS. She offers prose and poetry workshops for young people and adults, most recently at the literature centres in Lenzburg and Basel, with previous events held at SRF radio. Her work has been honoured many times.
Photo: Pascal Scheiber
Anna Miller, born in Zurich in 1987, is a freelance journalist, author, positive psychologist and founder of the Digital Balance Lab. She writes about people and our times for well-known newspapers and magazines in German-speaking countries, including SZ Magazin, NZZ am Sonntag and Die Zeit. Her focus is on using language to make reality more tangible. Miller is a member of the author collective Jetzt and the founder of the Writers’ Hour at the Zentrum Karl der Grosse. She is currently writing her first novel.
Project
A family home full of memories. A near death. And a village that looks the other way. The young protagonist of the novel tries to escape all this by lulling herself to safety in a new love. But her past soon casts a shadow over her future. In her first novel, Anna Miller processes impressions from her childhood in Switzerland in the 1980s and mixes scenic sketches with the question of whether we will ever manage to let go of our past.
In the mentoring program with Simone Lappert, Anna Miller and her mentor will discuss the existing material, address the question of how to deal with autobiographical material, investigate structure and narrative threads, and explore the possibilities between fact and fiction in order to move from memory to narrative. The aim is to find a narrative form with which the author can continue to develop her literary material after completing the mentoring programme.
