Nature Writing in der Lyrik

Esther Kinsky reads from "Slates" and "Mulberry Lines"

Reporting on nature. Writing with it as a motif. Even writing for nature. This has a long tradition in Germany, just think of Goethe and Kant. The genre has experienced a new boom thanks to authors from the Anglo-American world. The first international Nature Writing Festival is now taking place in Hamburg, initiated and organized by KJM Verlag, which has been successfully publishing "Essays on Nature and Landscape" for years.

The poet and novelist Esther Kinsky will be a guest at the Literaturhaus. In her texts, she encounters the region and the terrain until a fruitful understanding emerges from initially almost unintentional observation. "Schiefern" (Suhrkamp) serves the multi-award-winning writer as exploratory material, also in analogy to the exploration of human memory - slate is both stable and fragile at the same time. In "Maulbeerzeilen" (Edition Thanhäuser), the subject of the description is naturally more plant-based: "Only around the mulberry trees is it quiet ... The mulberry trees stand silent and dark green between field and field."

Esther Kinsky, who was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2018 for her novel "Hain", among others, will talk about her literature and her relationship to nature and nature writing with the writer Katharina Mevissen, who recently published the novel "Mutters Stimmbruch" with Wagenbach.

The event is part of the Nature Writing Festival, which takes place in Hamburg from June 17 to 21, 2025. ⌂ europeanessays.eu/festival