Petra Morsbach

Petra Morsbach, 2017

Petra Morsbach (born June 1, 1956 in Zurich ) is a German writer .

Life

Petra Morsbach is the daughter of a graduate engineer and a doctor. After graduating from high school in Starnberg in 1975, she studied theater studies , psychology and Slavic studies at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich until 1981 and, in 1981/82, directing in Leningrad at the theater institute ( Leningradskij Gosudarstvennyj Institut Teatra, Musyki i Kinematografii - LGITMiK ). In 1983, she was in Munich with a dissertation on Isaac Babel for Doctor of Philosophy PhD.

Morsbach worked for ten years as a dramaturge and director in Freiburg , Ulm and Bonn , most recently as a freelance director, and was responsible for over 20 productions, mainly in music theater .

She published her first novel, Suddenly It Is Evening, in 1995 by Eichborn Verlag, and has lived as a freelance writer on Lake Starnberg since then .

Characteristics of Petra Morsbach's storytelling are: Exact representation of different milieus, powers of observation, empathy, humor as well as “the construction of narrative arcs from a patchwork of episodes and anecdotes; a large, hardly overlooked arsenal of figures; finally the completely unpretentious, laconic, direct language ”, the“ integration of lightness and great seriousness ”. Her novel Gottesdiener about a Lower Bavarian priest , published in 2004, received a lot of attention . "With empathy, knowledge of the milieu and without ever smearing into denunciating cheapness, the sober picture of a religious landscape emerges, the heyday of which has only survived as a shallow reflection in the present."

In addition, Petra Morsbach is an opinionated essayist. Her bond Why Miss Laura Was Kind. About the Truth of Narration deals with the phenomenon that our language seems to know more than humans and questions the canonical reading of three famous books by Alfred Andersch, Marcel Reich-Ranicki and Günter Grass.

Petra Morsbach has been a member of the PEN Center Germany since 1999 and of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts since 2004 . In 2013 she received the Bavarian Literature Prize ( Jean-Paul Prize ) in recognition of the entire literary work.

Awards

• 2001 Marieluise Fleißer Prize from the city of Ingolstadt
• 2004 Villa Concordia in Bamberg
• 2005 Johann Friedrich von Cotta Prize for Literature and Translation from the City of Stuttgart
• 2007 Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation
• 2007 Casa Baldi in Lazio
• 2012 Inselschreiber scholarship on Sylt
• 2012 Pro meritis scientiae et litterarum of the Free State of Bavaria
• 2013 Jean Paul Prize
• 2016 Oberplan / Horní Planá sponsorship grant
• 2017 Roswitha Prize
• 2017 Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize for Palace of Justice

Works

• Isaak Babel on the Soviet stage (dissertation), Munich 1983.
• Suddenly it's evening (novel), Frankfurt am Main 1995.
• Opernroman (Roman), Frankfurt am Main 1998, series Die Other Bibliothek .
• Story with horses (novel), Frankfurt am Main 2001.
• Divine Servant (Roman) , Frankfurt am Main 2004.
• Why Miss Laura was kind . On the Truth of Storytelling (essay), Munich 2006.
• The harpsichord player (novel), Piper, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-492-04838-5 .
• Dichterliebe (novel), Knaus, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-8135-0372-2 .
• Justizpalast (Roman), Knaus, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-8135-0373-9 .

Web links

Commons : Petra Morsbach  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Petra Morsbach in the catalog of the German National Library
• petra-morsbach.de
• Petra Morsbach in the Bavarian literature portal (project of the Bavarian State Library )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Berndt Herrmann, in: Thomas Kraft (Hrsg.): Lexikon der Deutschensprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur , Nymphenburger / FA Helbig, Munich 2003.
2. ↑ Hannes Hintermeier: Truly be your word. The writer Petra Morsbach for her sixtieth . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of June 1, 2016, p. 12.
3. ↑ Winner of the Jean Paul Prize ( Memento of the original from June 27, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Bavarian State Ministry for Education and Culture, Science and Art 
4. ↑ Morsbach awarded for poetic custom-made work , NDR September 2, 2017, accessed September 14, 2017
5. ↑ Petra Morsbach receives Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize , Deutschlandfunk September 13, 2017, accessed September 14, 2017
6. ↑ Thomas Fischer : Palace of Futility . In: Zeit Online . November 13, 2017 ( zeit.de [accessed March 23, 2018]).