On World Refugee Day 2019, thirty years after the fall of Berlin Wall, join us for an evening with Birgit Vanderbeke (author) and Jamie Bulloch (translator) to celebrate the launch of 'You Would Have Missed Me', published by Peirene Press.
The Novel
West Germany in the early 1960s is a difficult place for a seven-year-old East German refugee. In the East, her Grandma made cakes and kept rabbits; now there is no baking, no pets and certainly no Grandma. Soon she will celebrate her seventh birthday and all she wants is a cat, but instead she receives an illuminated globe. She can’t hide her disappointment but soon discovers that the globe offers her a way to escape the misery of her parents' flat.
Today, as in the past, people flee from one country to another in the hope of finding a better future. But how do children experience such displacement? In this novel Birgit Vanderbeke goes back to her own childhood and shows how she saved herself by imagining countries on the far side of the world.
A masterpiece of memory turned into fiction.
Author
One of Germany’s most successful authors, Birgit Vanderbeke was born in Dahme in 1956. Her family fled from East Germany to the West when she was six and she grew up in Frankfurt. She has won 5 prestigious literary awards and has written twenty-one novels.
Photo: Goethe-Institut London © Jamie Bulloch
Translator
Jamie Bulloch has worked as a professional translator from German since 2001. This is the sixth Peirene book and the second book by Birgit Vanderbeke he has translated. Bulloch’s translation of Vanderbeke’s novel 'The Mussel Feast' won the 2014 Schlegel-Tieck Prize and was shortlisted for the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. His translation work includes books by Robert Menasse and Timur Vermes.
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