Radical volume of stories
The critics are fascinated by ‘The Shivering Fan‘.
The Iowa-born author Ann Cotten is currently seen as one of the most influential young voices on the German literary scene. The writer and poet won two highly regarded literary prizes in 2014: the Wilhelm Lehmann Prize, funded jointly by the Wilhelm Lehmann society and the City of Eckernförde, and the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, which is awarded by the Robert Bosch Foundation to authors who write in German, but whose mother tongue is not German. She is being honoured for her overall œuvre, but especially for her latest book ‘Der schaudernde Fächer’ (The Shivering Fan), 17 short stories “between poetry, realism and abstraction that imaginatively and radically resist the German slang of our times,” wrote the jury of the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize. Literary critics are also enthusiastic. “This is how the revolution might look,” exulted the weekly newspaper Die Zeit in its review of the book. “After the ‘proper writing’ of literary realism, Ann Cotten brings wild, hermetic provocation back to German literature.” Ann Cotten was born in 1982 in Ames, Iowa, grew up in Vienna, and has been living as a freelance writer in Berlin since 2006. Her début book ‘Fremdwörterbuchsonette’ (Sonnets on a Dictionary of Foreign Words), written in 2007, had already won several awards. She was recently awarded a Villa Kamogawa scholarship in Japan.
