Katrin McClean

Katrin McClean , née Dorn (born August 3, 1963 in Gotha ), is a German writer and theater pedagogue .

Life

McClean grew up in Thuringia and first worked in Eisenach as a dresser at the State Theater in Eisenach . She moved to Leipzig in 1984 and began studying psychology at the University of Leipzig . Then she worked as a psychologist in the 1989 and 1990 youth center "Heiterblick" in the Leipzig district Heiterblick hired, where you get the home theater organized and stage work over the Spartacus uprising rehearsed. After the fall of 1989/90 in the GDR , she became unemployed and began to write as a freelance author . In 1991, Katrin Dorn founded a youth theater group, a theater and literary association and organized workshops and courses in "Haus Steinstraße" . In 1993 she founded the literary magazine EDIT , of which she was editor-in-chief until the end of 1995.

In 1996, McClean moved to Berlin to where it in 1997 with the short story collection The hunger of the waitress at the Aufbau-Verlag debuted and then in 2001 the novel lies and silence followed. At the turn of the millennium she traveled to Argentina twice and then wrote the books Tango Stories and Milonga .

She has lived in Hamburg since 2001. In early 2007 she traveled with the jazz singer Frank McClean (1931-2018) in his native Panama and they married in the same year. She published some detective novels set in the Hamburg port city and writes new radio play scripts for the children's radio play series Five Friends after Enid Blyton .

She also works as a tutor for creative writing and has been teaching “Fantastic Teens” as part of the Hamburg writing workshop for young people since 2009.

Work and reception

In the Berliner Zeitung , Anke Westphal described McClean's debut The Waitress's Hunger as "a difficult and sometimes bumpy book, but also one that promises a lot". The portrayal of the autobiographical main character Marta suffers from “introspection to the edge of the cryptic and theatrical sentences”, but if the author has to “crochet a story for another character who is not so close to her, her story becomes convincing, round and strong ”.

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung was impressed by the "quiet, relentless tone" with which Katrin Dorn, in lies and silence, portrayed the petty-bourgeois milieu of a family critical of the SED regime and the emptiness in the relationships between parents and children disappointed with the embedding of this storyline in a failing love story that is too verbose about the topic of speechlessness. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung , Claus-Ulrich Bielefeld was bothered by the fact that Dorn's heroes had something like a decal and could not go beyond the "status of demonstration figures". For Sabine Peters in Der Freitag , the novel developed "into an increasingly fast-paced, brilliant psychodrama ", but it was "strongly constructed".

Annette Zerpner found reading the tango stories in the FAZ exhausting and felt bored with some passages. "Images and formulations [collide] again and again violently and without irony with the kitsch", "original images" remained the exception.

Heike Henderson described McClean's fourth book Milonga on Literaturkritik.de as a “wonderful love story, full of tenderness, longing, passion and pain” with a “gripping and unexcited narrative style”. She succeeded in " putting tango into words and telling a story of cultural differences, of coming together and of remaining alien without any educational undertones".

From 2008 to 2011 she published three Hamburg crime novels with Ellert & Richter Verlag .

In 2020 her autobiographical novel Aus dem Takt was published in self-publishing after publishers and literary agencies rejected the book.

Political commitment

McClean has been involved in the vigil for peace since 2014 as a co-organizer and with speeches in which she criticizes the military policy of the USA during and after the Second World War and the current depiction of the Ukraine crisis in the German media. In August 2014, she was the coordinator of a demonstration against the Spiegel reporting that she criticized as being one-sidedly anti-Russian . In February 2015, she said on the website of the Hamburg vigil: "Anyone who thinks distancing themselves from other protest groups and blocking them is more important than protesting against the government's militant course has already lost the fight". Christian Jakob rated this statement in March 2015 in the Taz as an “explicit rejection of a demarcation to the right”.

Awards

• 2000: Sponsorship award from the German Schiller Foundation
• 2003: Literature Prize of the City of Hamburg

Works

As Katrin Dorn

• The waitress's hunger . Story, Aufbau-Verlag , Berlin 1997, ISBN 978-3-351-02368-3 .
• Lies and silence . Roman, Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2001, ISBN 978-3-351-02386-7 .
• Tango stories . Stories, dtv , Munich 2002, ISBN 978-3-423-24308-7 .
• Milonga . Roman, dtv, Munich 2005, ISBN 978-3-423-24438-1 .

As Katrin McClean

• The child in the Speicherstadt . Roman, Ellert & Richter Verlag , Hamburg 2008 (paperback), ISBN 978-3-8319-0323-8 .
• In the shadow of money . Roman, Ellert & Richter Verlag, Hamburg 2009 (paperback), ISBN 978-3-8319-0347-4 .
• Tango to death . Roman, Ellert & Richter Verlag, Hamburg 2011 (paperback), ISBN 978-3-8319-0426-6 .
• Five friends . Radio play series, scripts from episode 86 (with a few exceptions), radio play label Europa in Hamburg
• Out of step . Roman, Tredition, Hamburg 2020 (Selfpublishing), ISBN 978-3-7482-8659-2 .

literature

• McClean, Katrin Dorn in: Kürschner's German Literature Calendar 2010/2011. Walter de Gruyter Verlag, Berlin / New York 2011, ISBN 978-3-11-023029-1 .

Web links

• Literature and recordings by Katrin McClean in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography and reviews of works by Katrin McClean at perlentaucher.de
• Biography Katrin Dorn - Katrin McClean ( Memento from January 14, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
• Katrin McClean presentation
• Katrin McClean on fuenf-freunde.de
• Katrin McClean is a guest (from 00: 30–28: 10 minutes) on Marith Vinzenz's literary program Writers Today and Yesterday
• Article by Katrin McClean at Telepolis

Individual evidence

1. ^ Anke Westphal: A woman of thirty years , Berliner Zeitung from March 20, 1997
2. ^ Frank McClean website
3. ↑ Doris Banuscher: Fantastic Stories , World on Sunday from March 16, 2014, page 14
4. ^ Anke Westphal: A woman of thirty years , Berliner Zeitung from March 20, 1997
5. ^ Speicherstadtmuseum Katrin McClean dances the tango and writes about death , Hamburger Abendblatt , August 12, 2011
6. ↑ Review summaries on lies and silence on Perlentaucher.de
7. ↑ Sabine Peters: Close to the horror. Friday , March 24, 2000, accessed on January 14, 2016 . 
8. ↑ Annette Zerpner: When partners lose their beat In: FAZ, October 28, 2002, p. 42.
9. ↑ Heike Henderson: Tango dancing through Berlin and Buenos Aires Literaturkritik.de of June 2, 2005
10. ^ Website of the author
11. ↑ "The one-sidedness is too great" , interview with Katrin McClean, Taz , August 7, 2014
12. ↑ Gitta Düperthal: "That was the peak of anti-Russian propaganda" , Junge Welt , August 9, 2014
13. ^ Christian Jakob: New Right Peace Movement: A thousand times touched , Taz , March 13, 2015
14. ^ German Schiller Foundation from 1859: Sponsorship award. All award winners in chronological order up to 1995 , accessed on July 31, 2015.
15. ↑ Hamburg Literature Awards : Prize Winners 2003 ( Memento from October 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on July 31, 2015.