Felicitas Hoppe, Büchner prize winner visits King's!
Earlier this year Felicitas Hoppe was awarded the much sought after Georg Büchner Preis for her contributions to the German literary world and we at King’s were lucky enough to have her here in the flesh on 3 December 2012. The focus of this event surrounded Hoppe’s novel ‘Picknick der Friseure’ which was first published in 1996. Lecturers and students (of various years) from the Department of German gathered, asking Hoppe countless questions concerning her text, with Hoppe responding with insightful and exciting points.
The question and answer session led into a translation workshop where the students were given the chapter ‘Der Balkon’ to translate and eventually read out. Although it was perhaps a little daunting to read out our translations to the author, Ms Hoppe seemed to enjoy our attempts to incorporate so called Britishisms, whilst keeping the intended meaning of the original German text. Many thanks to Felicitas Hoppe for affording her precious time to us and of course Dr Áine McMurtry and Dr Florian Lippert for their organisation of such a unique event.
Review by Olivia Wiltshire, German BA