A Celebration of Wolfgang Hilbig in Amsterdam
Mezreb | Veemkade Amsterdam, NH | 1019 Netherlands
We’re partnering with Versal journal’s “Verso” Live Journal series in Amsterdam.
This event will feature Editor Margarita Osipian hosting visiting poet Megan Fernandes and a reading from Wolfgang Hilbig’s The Sleep of the Righteous by translator Isabel Fargo Cole.
Versal is a literary and arts journal based in Amsterdam; Verso Live Journal events feature writers and translators from around the world.
Margarita Osipian is Editor of Versal journal and a freelance cultural producer, project developer, and grant writer.
Megan Fernandes is a poet and Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College. She is the author of The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books 2015), the poetry editor of the anthology Strangers in Paris (Tightrope Books 2011), and the author of two poetry chapbooks: Organ Speech (Corrupt Press) and Some Citrus Makes Me Blue (Dancing Girl Press). Her work has been published in the Boston Review, Postmodern Culture, Guernica, the Academy of American Poets, and the California Journal of Poetics, among others.
Wolfgang Hilbig (1941–2007) was one of the major German writers to emerge in the postwar era. Though raised in East Germany, he proved so troublesome to the authorities that in 1985 he was granted permission to emigrate to the West. The author of more than twenty books, he received virtually all of Germany’s major literary prizes, capped by the 2002 Georg Büchner Prize, Germany’s highest literary honor.
Isabel Fargo Cole is a U.S.-born, Berlin-based writer and translator. Her translations include five books of Wolfgang Hilbig’s, including Old Rendering Plant, for which she received the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. She has also been the recipient of a prestigious PEN/Heim Translation Grant, and her novel Die grüne Grenze was a finalist for the 2018 Preis der Leipziger Buchmesse.