Tamara Štajner: Raupenfell

In the organizer's words:

Literatür.jetzt. Feminist voices from everyday working life
Who cares? The Literatür .jetzt reading series is entering its second round. This time with a focus on stories by and about women and other FLINTA* people in the context of the world of work. Inevitably, topics such as unpaid care work, access and opportunities to education and paid work come up. Equally omnipresent are role expectations and attributions within the family, among friends, dealing with insecurity or suppressed anger.

* (The acronym FLINTA stands for women, lesbians, inter, non-binary, trans and agender people).

When the young Beatriz has to watch her mother drop dead from steaming pasta in a small kitchen in Novo mesto, Slovenia, and her father has long since absconded, she decides to build a life as a pianist in Vienna. She ends up in a convent run by the Salesian nuns, but even that doesn't go quite according to plan. Who owns a body that knows about many origins? Vienna, Porto, Ljubljana and two islands on the former Yugoslavian Adriatic coast provide the backdrop for this European novel, which finds extraordinary answers to the question of what it means both to give life and to be alive. Questions of autonomy, belonging, motherhood, devotion and loss are explored in a way that is both tender and radical.

Tamara Štajner Tamara Štajner was born in 1987 in Novo mesto, Slovenia. She completed her master's degree in viola performance at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. She is currently studying for a doctorate in music theory at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. In 2020 she was accepted into the Young Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz, followed by admission to the Gutenberg Academy in 2022. Her first volume of poetry, Schlupflöcher, was published in 2022; Raupenfell is her first novel. She lives in Vienna and in the Rhine-Main region.

Price information:

5 Euro / 8 Euro