ZEITGEIST | Guests and Ghosts

Participants

• Michael Lentz Author

  Michael Lentz is a distinguished author and musician known for his experimental texts and sound poetry. Lentz’s prolific output spans novels, short stories, plays, radio dramas, poetry, and compositions for a variety of ensembles. His 2007 novel, Pazifik Exil (S. Fischer Verlag), explored the German-speaking exile community in Los Angeles around figures such as Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Arnold Schoenberg. Since 2006, Lentz has served as Professor of Creative Writing at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. He has received numerous awards, including the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize (2001) and the Walter Hasenclever Literature Prize (2012). His most recent novel, Schattenfroh. Ein Requiem (S. Fischer Verlag), was published to critical acclaim. Lentz lives in Berlin and Leipzig.

• Tanja Paar Author

  Tanja Paar writes prose, plays, and essays. She studied philosophy, German, and history in Graz, Lausanne, and Vienna, where she now lives and writes, working for theatre and various publications. Her books include The Trembling World (2020), The Unscathed (Haymon Verlag, 2018), and Am Semmering (2025). She has received numerous awards and prizes for her writing, including the Elias Canetti Scholarship and the Robert Gernhardt Prize. Her blog, Mama geht studieren [Mama’s Going to Uni], described her experience studying computer sciences. Tanja Paar’s work incorporates different disciplines and media. In 2024, she was a fellow of the Literature Forum at the Brecht House in Berlin.

• Laura Vogt Author

  Laura Vogt studied cultural studies and creative writing. Her fourth novel, Das Jahr des Kalks, was published in 2026. Her two previous novels have been translated into English: Woman, Idle and What Concerns Us. Her work has been recognized with various grants and scholarships, most recently in 2025 with a scholarship from the Kunst + Kultur Foundation as part of the German Prize for Nature Writing. She lives with her family near St. Gallen, Switzerland.

• Alta L. Price Moderator

  Alta L. Price runs a publishing consultancy specialized in literature and nonfiction texts on art, architecture, design, and culture. Price’s work was awarded the 2013 Gutekunst Prize, and has been featured on BBC Radio 4, the European Literature Network, Specimen, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Of the more than 40 books Price has translated from Italian and German, novelist Juli Zeh’s New Year was a finalist for both the 2022 PEN America Translation Prize and the Helen & Kurt Wolff Prize. Price’s most recent translations include Mithu Sanyal’s Identitti (Astra House, 2022), Zeh’s About People (World Editions, 2023), Giorgio Agamben’s What I Saw, Heard, Learned… (Seagull Books, 2023), Alberto Giacometti’s selected family letters, Time Passes Too Soon (Scheidegger & Spiess, 2024), André Butzer’s Friedrich Hölderlin: The Seasons (Taschen, 2025), and Gesche Würfel’s The Absence and Presence of the Berlin Wall (Distanz, 2025). Price received a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship for Maddalena Fingerle’s Lingua madre.