Darkenbloom

Eva Menasse was born in Vienna in 1970 and has lived in Berlin for over twenty years. She began her career as a journalist, and has published several bestselling novels and short story collections, as well as essay collections. Her accolades include the Heinrich Böll Prize, the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize, the Jonathan Swift Prize, the Austrian Book Prize, the Ludwig Börne Prize, and a fellowship at the Villa Massimo in Rome. Her books have been translated into numerous languages and have sold 500,000 copies.Charlotte Collins studied English Literature at Cambridge University and worked as an actor and radio journalist in Germany and the UK before becoming a literary translator. Her co-translation, with Ruth Martin, of Nino Haratischvili’s The Eighth Life won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and in 2017 she was awarded the Goethe-Institut’s Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life. Other translations include Seethaler’s The Tobacconist, Homeland by Walter Kempowski, and Olga by Bernhard Schlink.

‘It is Menasse’s style—which is to say, the way she uses her narrator—that makes the case for her deep and original reimagining of history. This teasing, searching, playful, scathing voice, half inside the community and half outside it, sometimes as bland as soup and other times as sharp as death, recounts history as no responsible historian could.’