Higher Ground by Anke Stelling
Dear friends,
Yes, it is almost that time of the – second – month again: The Goethe-Institut Nairobi is pleased to invite you to our next public reading on
Thursday, May 19, 2022 at 7:00 pm at the Cheche Bookshop in Lavington.
The event will also be livestreamed via the Goethe-Institut Facebook page.
This May, we will introduce a novel that caused a lot of discussions in the German public – for its content (to be called painful, even rude), but also because its author won an important price for it:
Higher Ground is a novel in which a mother in her mid-forties tries to explain what she perceives as the realities of life to her teenage daughter, following a fall out with her childhood friends. Those friends grew up cocooned in upper-class affluence; Resi, today a journalist and writer with four children and an artist husband, did not. They all took for granted that their class divide would not impact their friendship. But it does, according to Resi who wrote a novel about it, challenging, bluntly, the myth of upward mobility in today’s world. The friends feel betrayed – and Resi’s family pays a high price.
It is the first novel by Berlin-based author Anke Stelling that was translated into English.
The reading series seeks to introduce literature originally written in German to an African audience: We will read excerpts of the book in both German and its English translation. The reading is followed by an open discussion on the themes in the book – and beyond.
The excerpts will be read by German Radio correspondent Antje Diekhans (German) and Linguistics lecturer at Kenyatta University, Fridah Kanana (English).
Refreshments will be served.
For directions, click
HERE
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