Literarische Woche: Verlassene Nester – Lesung & Gespräch mit Patricia Hempel

In the organizer's words:

Summer 1992 in the former Elbe border region. Pilly is thirteen and longs to belong. But even two years after reunification, her family still clings to the ideals of yesterday. Her father flees to the pub, her aunts dream of the Golden West and there is still no trace of Pilly's mother. Pilly only finds support in her older classmate Katja. A fallacy. She has no idea that at the end of this summer, her world will once again be a different one. The concrete plant's mixing plants and conveyor belts come to a standstill. Just like the lives of the people in the fictitious planned town on the Elbe. While Pilly tries at all costs to win the attention of her older schoolmate Katja, her father drinks against the memories. Her mother is long gone, supposedly in the West, although there is an ironclad silence about it. The aunts want to realize their dream of the Golden West and risk their livelihood in the process. The summer takes a drastic turn when one day the gardens of the Vietnamese contract workers burn down and Pilly is suddenly confronted by a woman who claims to be her mother.

"Patricia Hempel is a master of the subterranean. In this novel, the lust for life and the lies of life coalesce into a frightening undergrowth." (Katja Kullmann). Patricia Hempel, born in Berlin in 1983, first studied prehistory and early history before moving from archaeology to study literary writing/editing at the University of Hildesheim. Her first novel Metrofolklore was published in 2017. She has been a member of the editorial board of the queer literary magazine GLITTER since 2020 and is a networker for queer visibility and diversity in the literary industry and book trade in the Queer Media Society (QMS). She is a founding member of PEN Berlin and participates in the Diversity Working Group.

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