A girl comes to Germany from Russia with her family in 1992 and ends up in a small Swabian town in a home for asylum seekers. In her autobiographical novel, Lena Gorelik writes about identity between pride and shame, stubbornness and adaptation.
In Karlsruhe, the Scheffel Prize winner will talk about life and politics in today's Germany and the significance of the most important award in German for her future career. She received the Scheffel Prize at Friedrich-Schiller-Gymnasium Ludwigsburg in 2001.
Lena Gorelik was born in Saint Petersburg in 1981. She trained at the German School of Journalism in Munich and studied Eastern European Studies. She writes plays, radio plays, essays and reports for "DIE ZEIT", among others, and teaches creative writing at various universities and literary institutions. Her published novels include "Meine weißen Nächte" (2004), "Hochzeit in Jerusalem" (2007), "Die Listensammlerin" (2014), "Null bis unendlich" (2015) and "Mehr Schwarz als Lila" (2017). In 2022, Lena Gorelik was awarded the Text & Language Literature Prize by the Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie (BDI), received a lectureship in poetry at the University of Hanover and curated the Literature Festival in Stuttgart in 2023. In the same year, she received the Marieluise Fleißer Prize, the Thomas Bernhard Scholarship and the Retzhofer Drama Prize for Young Audiences. In 2024, she was awarded the Heinrich Mann Prize of the Academy of Arts.
An event organized by the Literarische Gesellschaft Karlsruhe and Stephanus-Buchhandlung.
