Delighted to be asked back again this year to perform with the wonderful Ulrike Almut Sandig at this year's Oxford Translation Day. See the programme for the two days below or here
Come along to the launch event for Ulrike Almut Sandig, Thick of it (Seagull Books, 2018).
The poems of Ulrike Almut Sandig are at once simple and fantastic. This collection finds her on her way to imaginary territories. Thick of It charts a journey through two hemispheres to “the center of the world” and navigates a “thicket” that is at once the world, the psyche, and language itself. The poems explore an urgently urban reality, but that reality is interwoven with references to nightmares, the Bible, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes—all overlaid with a finely tuned longing for a disappearing world. The old names are forgotten, identities fall away; things disappear from the kitchen; everything is sliding away. Powerful themes emerge, but always mapped onto the local, the fractured individual in “the thick of it” all. This is language at its most crafted and transformative, blisteringly contemporary, but with a kind of austerity, too. By turns comic, ironic, sceptical, nostalgic, these poems are also profoundly musical, exploiting multiple meanings and stretching syntax, so that the audience is constantly kept guessing, surprised by the next turn in the line.
Ulrike Almut Sandig with read from Thick of it (Seagull Books, 2018) and new poems and sound pieces with her translator Karen Leeder
Ulrike Almut Sandig was born in Großenhain in 1979 and grew up in Saxony. She has published two books of short stories and four volumes of poetry, most recently ich bin ein Feld voller Raps, verstecke die Rehe und leuchte wie dreizehn Ölgemälde übereinandergelegt (Frankfurt: Schöffling and Co., 2016). She often collaborates with filmmakers, composers, sound artists and musicians and her new album with her band LANDSCHAFT will appear in the Autumn. She has won many prizes, including the Leonce and Lena Prize (2009), the Literary Prize of the Federation of German Industries (2017) and the Wilhelm Lehmann Prize (2018). She lives in Berlin with her family.
