A well-rounded Affair with Tomer Gardi

Literature Festival|at The Fourteenth Edition of Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai Litfest

About Tomer Gardi and his prize-winning book:

Are you allowed to write a book in a language you are not fully in command of? Turns out, yes- and you can even win a major literary award for it. Israel-born author Tomer Gardi wrote And Nothing Ever Ends in broken German and has been awarded the 2022 Leipzig Book Fair Prize. In the book, two artists from two different centuries travel through linguistic and cultural spaces. Experiences of foreignness, identity, life as an artist, and lots of politics are the major themes of the novel, in which the two storylines mirror each other.

First, Tomer Gardi, written in German, sends himself as a literary character with the talking German shepherd Rex and the elf king or even Goethe’s Erlkönig at his side on a fantastic-adventurous odyssey, slapstick, funny and with many subliminal pinpricks. In the second part of the novel, translated from Hebrew, the readers follow the 19th century

Indonesian painter Raden Saleh from Java through Europe and back to Asia—a historical novel and at the same time a reflection of our times.

Leipziger Buchmesse 2022 - Prize:
Explaining their choice, the jury in Leipzig described “Eine runde Sache” as a firework of imagination that plays both artfully and boldly with people’s reading habits and expectations of a novel.“

Tomer Gardi, born in 1974 in Kibbuz Dan in Galilee, studied literature in Tel Aviv and Berlin. Broken German is Tomer Gardi’s first novel written in German. Otherwise You’ll Get Your Money Back is his second novel, published in 2019. His novel And Nothing Ever Ends has been awarded the 2022 Leipzig Book Fair Prize in fiction. He lives in Berlin.

In collaboration with The Fourteenth Edition of Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai Litfest, we are pleased to organise a workshop and a reading with Tomer Gardi.

In addition to the festival activities, we are organising a Story Weaving workshop for teachers of German language in our library.