Online Reading and Discussion

Moderated by Dr Milind Brahme, Professor of German Studies, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

Leif Randt is a German writer living in Maintal and Berlin. 

He studied creative writing and cultural journalism at the University of Hildesheim. In 2006 he was a finalist at the 14th Open Mike of the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin. He wrote a screenplay titled Innocence for a Razor film production and performed at the PROSANOVA festival in 2008. In 2009 he won the jury prize of the Kultur SPIEGEL competition, and in the same year his debut novel Leuchtspielhaus was published by Berlin Verlag. In 2010, Randt won the 1st prize of the MDR Literature Prize and received the Nicolas Born Debut Prize of the Lower Saxony Literature Commission. In 2011, Leif Randt received the Ernst Willner Prize at the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for an excerpt from his novel project Schimmernder Dunst über Coby County. In 2012, Randt received the Düsseldorf Literature Prize. The novel Planet Magnon was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 2015 and was included by Der Spiegel in its list of "50 Books of Our Time." Randt's fourth novel Allegro Pastell was published in 2020; it was nominated for the Leipzig Book Prize and included in the longlist of the German Book Prize. Since 2017, Leif Randt has co-curated the PDF and video label tegelmedia.net.

Allegro Pastel is the story of an almost normal love affair; it is Randt's first book to use almost exclusively real-life locations, especially clubs, restaurants, and bars. The novel is about the relationship between Jerome Daimler, a web designer from Frankfurt, and Tanja Arnheim, a writer from Berlin. They are in a long-distance relationship; they remain closely connected through text and image, visiting each other for long weekends in their respective realities. Jerome and Tanja are there for each other, but not lost to each other. But the desire to preserve their affection without it becoming stodgy or painfully existential presents the couple with a major challenge. A late-teens love story. 

Friday, September 22, 2023
7 p.m.-8:30 p.m. at Zoom.
Registration Required. Click here to register for the event.