Gregor Sander

Gregor Sander was born in Schwerin in 1968. His new stories are set in an intermediate sphere where it is difficult to distinguish between night and day. He seeks out places on the shores of the Baltic Sea, where snow and ice cover up the contours of things and the twilight appears to blur the distinction between solids and liquids, civilisation and wilderness. Sander uses Sweden’s bleak landscape, the East German coast with its islands and the Curonian Spit in turn as the setting for his stories.  In this landscape, time, too becomes permeable, with relics from the Nazi period and from the demised GDR repeatedly appearing on the edge of perception. And just as the landscape is interspersed with vestiges of history, the characters’ experience, too, is penetrated by the past. Gregor Sander dispatches ordinary, familiar people into his coastal worlds – advertising agents, doctors, heating installers, lawyers and students. Usually, his first–person narrators are at an important juncture in their life story without being fully aware of the fact.

Nico Bleutge: „Am Meer, neben der Spur“
© Süddeutsche Zeitung, 8 September 2011