Sabrina Janesch

Sabrina Janesch (2011)

Sabrina Janesch (* 1985 in Gifhorn ) is a German-Polish writer .

Life

Sabrina Janesch passed her Abitur in 2004 at the Otto Hahn Gymnasium in Gifhorn. She studied creative writing and cultural journalism at the University of Hildesheim and two semesters of Polish studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow . Since graduating in summer 2009, she has been working as a writer and journalist .

The German-Polish ancestry of the author influenced her literary career: after she drew attention to herself with the first prize at the NDR 's original sound literature competition in 2005, Janesch became the first city clerk in Gdansk in 2009 with a grant from the German Cultural Forum for Eastern Europe . In addition, she received a working grant from the Lower Saxony Ministry for Science and Culture and received a grant from the Stuttgart Writer's House and the Berlin Literary Colloquium . In 2010 she took part in the competition for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and received the Mara Cassens Prize for the best German-language debut novel. In 2011 she received the Nicolas Born Award of the State Government of Lower Saxony and the Anna Seghers Award and in 2012 the Award of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia for young artists . In 2014 she received the annual scholarship of the State of Lower Saxony and in 2015 the Culture Prize Silesia of the State of Lower Saxony , in 2017 the Annette von Droste Hülshoff Prize .

Janesch now lives in Münster .

plant

Janesch's debut novel Katzenberge is about a young woman who, on the occasion of the death of her grandfather, takes a trip to Lower Silesia in order to find out the German-Polish origins of her family. With this, Sabrina Janesch takes on a sensitive topic in modern history - the expulsion of Germans after the Second World War . In simple sentences, she tells of the life of a farmer from Galicia who was resettled to Lower Silesia at the end of the Second World War after the transfer of former Polish territories to the Ukraine in order to take over the farms of killed or expelled German settlers. In the process, he discovers the German owner who has hanged himself in the attic of an abandoned farm. At night he thinks he hears voices and footsteps and decides to take the corpse away. Janesch's narrative attitude was also described in the context of a modern, magical realism .

Hanns-Josef Ortheil called the book a "wonderfully narrated debut novel that swings back and forth between the present and the past as light as a feather", Günter Grass wrote about Janesch's debut: " We wish many readers of this book."

Works (selection)

The outermost limit , in: BELLA triste , number 23, Hildesheim 2008, ISSN 1618-1727
Katzenberge , Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-351-03319-4
Ambra , Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-351-03500-6
Tango for a dog , Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-351-03308-8
The golden city , Rowohlt Berlin, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-87134-838-9