Against The World (Dumont Verlag)

Join us for a very special event as tonight's co-sponsor, Villa Aurora, presents their writer-in residence, Jan Brandt.

A village on the furthest outskirts of northwest Lower Saxony, only a few kilometres from the Dutch border: Cows are grazing on the meadows, farmers are tilling their fields, every once in a while the din of a low-lying aircraft disturbs the tranquility. Flowers are blossoming behind the trimmed cedar hedges, shiny, freshly waxed new cars stand in the driveways.

This is the world into which Daniel Kuper was born in the mid 1970s, a lanky, withdrawn boy with much too much imagination and much too little opportunity to live out only a fraction of it. Strange things soon start taking place and Kuper is held responsible. The more he tries to rebut the accusations, the deeper he gets enmeshed in them. Kuper takes up the fight against the village, its inhabitants, its traditions, its narrowness and its closeness. They are ones Kuper rebels against and they are the ones he loses out to in the end.

Jan Brandt, born in Leer (Eastern Frisia) in 1974, studied history and literature in Cologne, London and Berlin and graduated from the German Journalism School in Munich. Amongst others his short stories have been published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. He was awarded numerous fellowships and residences such as to Ledig House and Yaddo in New York. Brandt’s first novel Against The World was a finalist for the 2011 German Book Award and won the Nicolas-Born-First-Novel-Award. It’s going to be published in English by Seagull Books in 2015. His second novel deals Germans who emigrated to America.