Reading and Conversation
Linda Stift in conversation with Tim Corballis
Present Pasts: Vienna, London, Berlin, Wellington
A young woman is invited to tea and cake with a woman who dresses and acts like the legendary Empress Sisi in Linda Stift’s “The Empress and the Cake”. Is this the Empress incognito, a strange obsession, or history seeping into Viennese life?
Tim Corballis’s twin novellas “R.H.I” are built around the material traces of early Freud follower Joan Riviere and East German architect Hermann Henselmann – notebooks and letters in the archives of the British Psychoanalytic Society and buildings in Berlin. His most recent novel “The Future is in the Air” imagines an alternative past where travel to the future in the 1960s has changed New Zealand’s path.
Come along for short readings and literary conversation about history, fiction, memory, place and time.
Linda Stift is a prize-winning Austrian writer. Her works include "Kingpeng" (2005), “Stierhunger” (2007), “Kein einziger Tag" (2011) and "Unter den Steinen" (2016). “Stierhunger” was translated into English as “The Empress and the Cake” (2016, tr. J. Bulloch). She writes for the Austrian magazine “Spectrum” and lives in Vienna. Linda is in New Zealand to give a keynote lecture at the GSAA conference at Victoria University.
Tim Corballis is the author of the novels “Below” (2001), “Measurement” (2002), “The Fossil Pits” (2005), “R.H.I” (2015) and “Our Future Is in the Air” (2017), as well as a substantial body of short fiction, essays and art writing. In 2005 he was awarded the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers’ Residency, and later completed a PhD at the University of Auckland on aesthetic theory. He lives in Wellington with his partner and their twin daughters.
Details
Wellington, Goethe-Institut, 150 Cuba Street