Lesung mit Bettina Wilpert

In the organizer's words:

On February 5, we will celebrate the book premiere of her third novel "Die bärtige Frau" with Bettina Wilpert. The evening will be hosted by cultural journalist, editor and literary critic Lara Sielmann.

Alex, a teacher from Leipzig, travels to her mother's home village in Bavaria for the weekend. Her mother has broken her leg. Together with her older sister, she wants to move their bedroom to the first floor. It is the first time Alex has been away from her one-year-old child since she was born. She misses her daughter and realizes how much her child's little body is inscribed in her own. This feeling makes her take a closer look at herself, reflect on her life choices and question desire, the body, gender and her socialization.
"The Bearded Woman" is a novel about the female body, how it changes, about pregnancy and motherhood, about what it is like to have children and to grow into a new role. It is about Christian imprinting, about the fact that we cannot get rid of our family, even if we want to. About life roles and decisions, about values, coolness and reality. Is the desire for security reprehensible? How should we be? Who determines it apart from ourselves?

Bettina Wilpert, born in 1989 and raised near Altötting, studied Cultural Studies, English and Literary Writing in Potsdam, Berlin and Leipzig. Her debut novel "nichts, was uns passiert" was published by Verbrecher Verlag in 2018, for which she was awarded the ZDF "aspekte" literature prize for the best literary debut of the year, the Lessing Prize of the Free State of Saxony and the Kranichstein Youth Literature Scholarship, among others. The book has been adapted for the stage by the Stadttheater Gießen and the Thalia Theater Hamburg, among others, and has been translated into three languages (Dutch, Greek and Slovenian). Bettina Wilpert was recently awarded a scholarship from the Villa Aurora Los Angeles. She lives as a freelance writer and mother in Leipzig.

Lara Sielmann is a cultural journalist, literary critic and curator. She works as a freelance editor and author for Deutschlandfunk Kultur and is a regular presenter of readings and panel discussions. She is a juror for various literary prizes (including the German Translators' Fund, Alfred Döblin Prize 2025) and a guest lecturer at the FU Berlin in the master's program "Applied Literary Studies - Contemporary Literature". She lives in Berlin.