Ulrike Draesner, former Writer in Residence at New College, will be back in Oxford on the 26th May 2023 for a special reading from her recent, highly acclaimed, novel Die Verwandelten, which has been shortlisted for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize.
Described by Judith Hoffmann as a ‘A captivating family saga that wrests an entirely new, female dimension from the violent twentieth century’, Die Verwandelten is a multi-generational, continent-spanning novel that examines women’s experience of war, motherhood and inherited trauma. A lyrical tour de force by award-winning German author and poet Ulrike Draesner, it is thematically wide-ranging yet gets to the nub of complex issues with startling clarity. A novel for our times, with echoes of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Anna Karenina.
In Die Verwandelten, Draesner has built an intricate plot around seven female protagonists, whose lives intersect across the span of a century. The novel centres on the Nazi Lebensborn programme, under which Aryan women were encouraged to have children who were then given away to Nazi families.
