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6:00 PM-7:30 PM

Meet the Author with Iris Wolff: Glimmer of Light

International Online Book Club|Reading & Discussion

Iris Wolff Glimmer of Light Book Cover © Klett-Cotta Verlag

Iris Wolff Lichtungen Buch Cover © Klett-Cotta Verlag

On 3 June 2025, the author will be a guest at #Meet the Author. The conversation will be led by Belén Santana, the translator who translated Iris Wolff's Lichtungen into Spanish.

The event will take place online and in German. As always, participation is free and all are welcome.

Glimmer of Light

Lev and Kato have had a special bond since they were children. But the opening of European borders broadens their life plans and changes their relationship forever. Full of beauty and devotion, Iris Wolff's great new novel tells of timeless friendship and what it takes to free oneself from the imprints of one's own origins.

When eleven-year-old Lev is confined to bed for weeks, Kato, of all people, who is clever but shunned by everyone, is sent to his bedside to bring him his homework. An unbreakable bond develops between the unlikely pair, which frees Lev from his petrification and offers the two adolescents a foothold in the multi-ethnic communist state of Romania. Half a lifetime later, Lev is still retracing the paths of her childhood, while Kato left for the West years ago. All Lev has left are the postcards she drew from all over Europe. Until one day he receives a card from Zurich with just one sentence: ‘When are you coming?’ Iris Wolff skilfully and poetically transforms that moment into language when one life touches another and, in her great European novel, paints the portrait of a touching friendship that reveals itself as a journey into the past and whose glow lingers on for a long time.

Iris Wolff

Author

Iris Wolff was born in Sibiu, Transylvania. The author has been honoured with numerous awards for her literary work, including the Eichendorff Literature Prize, the Marieluise Fleißer Prize, the Marie Luise Kaschnitz Prize and the Solothurn Literature Prize for her complete works. Most recently, the novel Lichtungen was published in 2024, which was awarded the Uwe Johnson Prize and the Spycher: Leuk Literature Prize and was nominated for the shortlist of the German Book Prize. The author lives in Freiburg im Breisgau.

Belén Santana

Translator

Belén Santana is a translator from German and a lecturer in the Department of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Salamanca. She researches the translation of humour and works in the field of theoretical and practical literary translation. She has translated both fiction and non-fiction among the many authors of the German language, such as Sebastian Haffner, Ingo Schulze, Julia Franck, Alfred Döblin, Siegfried Lenz, Carolin Emcke, Navid Kermani, Saša Stanišić, Anne Weber and Ronya Othmann. In 2019, she was awarded the National Prize for Best Translation (Premio Nacional a la Mejor Traducción) for Etudes in the Snow by Yoko Tawada.