Angelika Overath and Claudia Demel
Photo: Franziska Bartal
Angelika Overath: Born in Karlsruhe in 1957, studied German, History, Italian and Empirical Cultural Studies in Tübingen. She completed her doctorate with a thesis on the colour blue in modernist poetry. During her studies, she already worked as a freelance reporter. She has written for magazines including Transatlantik, edited by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, GEO, Du, Merian, das Magazin, Mare. From 1994 to 2014, she was a literary critic for the NZZ and wrote the column ‘Abgründe’ for the NZZ am Sonntag newspaper for fifteen years. Today, she writes reviews for the FAZ. She has published volumes of reportage and essays, including ‘Alle Farben des Schnees’. ‘Senter Tagebuch’ and five novels. Most recently, ‘A Winter in Istanbul’ (2018). ‘Krautwelten’, a literary non-fiction book about the wondrous cabbage plant, was published in 2021. In 2022, ‘Schwarzhandel mit dem Himmel/Marchà nair cul azur’, her third volume of poetry with translingual sibling poems in Rhaeto-Romanic and German. She regularly teaches at the Swiss School of Journalism MAZ in Lucerne. Together with her husband, the literary scholar and essayist Manfred Koch, she runs a writing school in her village in the Engadin. As a mentor, she takes the personality of the writer as her starting point and tries to find out with them where an idea comes from and where it wants to go. When working on a text, she asks questions about the narrative perspectives, the depiction of the milieu, the psychological coherence; she pays attention to rhythm and tone. And she makes suggestions.
Photo: René Sigrist
Claudia Demel, born in Dresden in 1977, studied transport economics and graduated in Lausanne. Since then, she has lived and worked in the Basel region. She has a degree in journalism and, in recent years, has mainly worked as an editor for the Centro Giacometti in Stampa (GR). The two-volume biography of the artist Augusto Giacometti was published by Scheidegger & Spiess in 2022, the texts of which she edited. She attended various writing courses in Basel and Sent and is currently writing her first novel.
Project
Merrit left her home, a small town in eastern Germany, and decided to live in a big city in Switzerland. She returns less and less often for a short stay. Here, she cannot escape them: the vague memories, the reproachful family and also the feeling of increasingly feeling like a stranger on what was once familiar terrain. In June 2019, she visits for three days to celebrate her sister’s birthday. This time, Merrit narrowed her gaze to make a decision. Will she answer the call of her old university and return?
The novel takes place across these three days and is extended in time by flashbacks. In the mentoring session with Angelika Overath, the material will be filtered, the spectrum of narrative perspectives structured and the plot dynamised.
