Katherine Dunn

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Katherine Karen Dunn (born October 24, 1945 in Garden City , Kansas ; died May 11, 2016 in Portland , Oregon ) was an American writer and journalist .

Life

Katherine Dunn had a "disordered" childhood - "the family moved around almost as much as the Fabulon, picking grapes, living out of cars, taking on odd jobs" - and she had to constantly change schools, always changing roles and also played the class clown. Eventually she attended high school in Tigard , Oregon and then Reed College in Portland, Oregon. After graduating, she spent several years in Europe in various jobs and returned to Portland in the early 1970s.

Since then she has worked as a radio presenter and critic, and has written freelance for various newspapers. She also taught creative writing classes at Pacific University in Forest Grove , Oregon . Dunn wrote weekly columns for the local weekly Willamette Week , these contributions she collected in 1989 in The Slice: Information with an Attitude . Her reviews and essays have appeared in Playboy , Vogue and the LA Times .

Dunn wrote about boxing as a reporter and was an editor for The Cyber ​​Boxing Zone . In 1981 she was the only female reporter in the Thomas Hearns versus Sugar Ray Leonard fight . In 2009 a collection of her reports and essays appeared in One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing . For her study School of Hard Knocks: The Struggle for Survival in America's Toughest Boxing Gyms , photographer Jim Lommasson and she won the Dorothea Lange - Paul Taylor Prize in 2004 .

Dunn published three novels. In Geek Love , the third novel, the protagonists, a showman family with unusually deformed children, geeks , strive for an ordinary family life. It was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 1989 and became a bestseller, but wasn't translated into German until 2013. Dunn immediately received an advance payment from Alfred A. Knopf for the next novel, but it was not until 2010 that a first excerpt of the novel Cut Man appeared in the Paris Review under the title Rhonda Discovers Art .

Works

  • Attic . Warner Books, New York, 1970.
  • Truck . Harper & Row, New York, 1971.
  • Let me go now: (incident on a 9th floor balcony) . Poem. The Impossibilists, Portland, Oregon, 1979.
  • Geek love . Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1989.
    • Binewskis: Decay of a Radioactive Family: Roman . From the English by Monika Schmalz. Berlin-Verlag, Berlin, 2013, ISBN 978-3-8270-1072-8 .
  • Why do men have nipples ?: and other low-life answers to real-life questions . Warner Books, New York, 1992.
  • One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing . Conductor, Portland, 2009.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nigel Jaquiss: Katherine Dunn, Author of Geek Love, Dies at 70 . Willamette Week , May 12, 2016.
  2. ↑ a b c d Gene Stone: Novelist Katherine Dunn Admits Her Geek Love Is Stranger Than Most Fiction — but Aren't We All . In: People , April 17, 1989, accessed May 15, 2016.
  3. ^ Website The Cyber ​​Boxing Zone . Retrieved May 15, 2016.
  4. ↑ 2004 Winners: Katherine Dunn and Jim Lommasson at Duke University
  5. ^ Rhonda Discovers Art, Katherine Dunn . Paris Review 193, Summer 2010, accessed May 15, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Dunn, Katherine
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dunn, Katherine Karen (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH October 24, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Garden City , Kansas , United States
DATE OF DEATH May 11, 2016
Place of death Portland , Oregon , United States