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6:00 PM

Meet the Author with
Fiona Sironic

Online book presentation and discussion|Online book presentation and discussion

Zoom Link

Fiona Sironic © Apollonia Theresa Bitzan

Fiona Sironic © Apollonia Theresa Bitzan

Climate crisis, digital footprints and the longing for closeness: With Am Samstag gehen die Mädchen in den Wald und jagen Sachen in die Luft (On Saturdays, the girls go into the forest and blow things up), Fiona Sironic made it onto the shortlist for the 2025 German Book Prize with her debut novel. In her queer coming-of-age novel, she asks pressing questions: How does the ongoing destruction of nature shape our idea of the future? And what does identity mean in a world where the internet never forgets?

Author Fiona Sironic will be a guest at Meet the Author in February 2026 to present her novel in conversation with Rainer Fußgänger from the Goethe-Institut Sweden. The event will take place online and in German.
 

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Am Samstag gehen die Mädchen in den Wald und jagen Sachen in die Luft

It's burning. In the woods and on the screens. Fifteen-year-old Era lives with her mother on the edge of the forest and tries to counteract the creeping process of destruction by documenting the extinction of birds. In a stream, she watches her classmate Maja and her sister Merle blowing up hard drives in the neighbouring clearing. Maja is the daughter of two momfluencers who is trying to erase the memories of a public childhood.

While Era keeps notebooks, makes drawings and tries to organise all the knowledge she has access to, Maja forms a destructive counterforce. Nevertheless, Era and Maja are connected in their search for intimacy and analogue stimuli. As the turtle dove dies out, the two fall in love. But it is not only the birds that are threatened: when a large-scale fire destroys the forest, the girls also lose a significant part of their habitat.

Text source: © Harpercollin (translated with AI)
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BIO

Sironic Fiona

Author

Fiona Sironic (born in Neuss in 1995) studied language arts, creative writing and gender studies in Hildesheim and Vienna, where she now lives as a freelance writer. She also gives workshops and writes about digital games in her journalistic work. Sironic has received various awards and scholarships for her literary texts. As part of the German Prize for Nature Writing 2024, she received a workshop scholarship for an excerpt from her debut novel Am Samstag gehen die Mädchen in den Wald und jagen Sachen in die Luft (On Saturdays, the girls go into the forest and blow things up). The novel also made it onto the shortlist for the German Book Prize 2025.

Rainer H. Fußgänger

Moderation

Rainer H. Fußgänger (born in Mönchengladbach in 1962) studied modern German literature, political science and American literature in Aachen and Cologne. He worked as a consultant for German educational cooperation at the Goethe-Institut Sweden in Stockholm. He also gained international experience during extended stays as a German teacher in the Russian Federation and Finland.  On his Booktube channel, he mainly discusses recent English-language literature.