Himmelwärts

Heavenwards is a wonderful and invigorating story about the loss of a person and the beauty of life.

Toni's mother is in heaven. But her best friend YumYum says that no energy is lost in the universe, so there's a plan: with a homemade space receiver - yes, YumYum can do that - a tent and lots of sweets, the mission to make contact begins! And indeed! Suddenly a woman's voice comes out of the device. It's astronaut Zanna from the ISS space station. Toni and YumYum can't believe it and ask Zanna everything they've always wanted to know: about weightlessness, the planets and stars - and finally about death. But above all about life. With childlike curiosity, Toni and YumYum think about infinity, black holes, the speed of light and other unimaginable mysteries of the universe.

Karen Köhler was born in Hamburg, wanted to become a cosmonaut, learned to skydive and studied acting. After twelve years in the profession, she now writes plays, radio plays, screenplays and prose. She likes math and space and lives in Hamburg's St. Pauli district. Her highly acclaimed collection of stories "Wir haben Raketen" ("We fished for rockets") was published in 2014 and her novel "Miroloi" in 2019. She has been writing regularly for ZEITmagazin since 2022. In 2024, she published "Himmelwärts", which was written as a play, as her first children's novel. The novel was awarded the Luchs Book Prize in February 2024.