Join acclaimed Austrian novelist, playwright and essayist Kaśka Bryla for this online Encounter in collaboration with the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature and Culture. The author will read extracts from her latest novel mein vater, der gulag, die krähe und ich and discuss its themes and the process of translation with Sheridan Marshall.
A sample translation by Sheridan Marshall will be available to download a week before the event.
The event will be moderated by Andrea Capovilla, Director of the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre.
mein vater, der gulag, die krähe und ich is set in the now strangely distant Covid years. The narrator lives in a caravan community on the wooded outskirts of Leipzig in the company of other people but is self-isolating having contracted Covid, which turns into Long Covid. The summer of 2020 is hot and beautiful, yet fear and uncertainty reign everywhere, not least from within the medical establishment confronting the narrator. Supported by internal conversations with her father who was interned in the Gulag as a member of the Polish underground army, she wishes to write his story which has shaped her character and to process her grief following his death from lung cancer. Her own struggle for self-determination as a queer woman feels familiar and yet very different, and she draws strength from the stranded baby crow Karl, whom she cares for as long as it cannot fly. Lovingly, laconically and sometimes surreally, Bryla interweaves shots of conversations with her father, feverish dreams and loneliness. Courageous and tender, the novel tells of the struggle for survival under difficult conditions.
Kaśka Bryla is a novelist, dramatist and essayist who grew up between Vienna and Warsaw. She studied economics in Vienna and literary writing at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig, where she co-founded the literary magazine PS – Political Writing in 2015. Her works include the play Im Herzen der Krähen and the novels Roter Affe (2020) and Die Eistaucher (2022). mein vater, der gulag, die krähe und ich was published in the summer of 2025 and was on the longlist for the Austrian Book Prize 2025.
Sheridan Marshall is a freelance editor and literary translator. She has been part of the editorial team for New Books in German for fifteen years and was Deputy Editor of The Austrian Riveter.
This event takes place online via Zoom. Attendance is free; advance online registration is essential! Please register here.
The Encounters bring together writers and translators giving the audience a fascinating insight into the working relationship between the two. More about the Encounters series and previous Encounters.
