Lutz Seiler: 60th Birthday on June 8, 2023

On June 8, 2023, Lutz Seiler celebrates his 60th birthday.

Seiler was born in Gera, Thuringia, in 1963 and today lives in Wilhelmshorst near Berlin and in Stockholm. He underwent training as a mason and a carpenter and completed his studies in 1990. Since 1997, he has been the literary director and custodian of the Peter Huchel Museum. He has traveled to Central Asia, Eastern Europe and was writer-in-residence at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles and at the German Academy in Rome. His many prizes include the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, the Bremen Prize for Literature, the Fontane Prize, and the Uwe Johnson Prize. His works have been translated into twenty-five languages. Some of his stories, poems and essays have appeared in English in the journals The White Review, Poetry, Modern Poetry in Translation and PN Review.

Following his best-selling, award winning novel Kruso (German Book Prize, Uwe Johnson Prize, Kakehashi Prize for Literature), Suhrkamp Verlag most recently published the novel Stern 111 (shortlisted for the Prix Femina étranger, winner of the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair) and the collection of poetry schrift für blinde riesen.

We congratulate our author on this joyous occasion.
 

»Seiler has masterful command of a subtle style, both skittish and firm in its diction and movement, tense and tensile in its branching extensions and jittery vertiginous drops. One could call it elliptical, but it’s more a kind of binocular vision, with one lens ground for cosmic focus and the other for a microscope.
The voicing of such vision shifts from ecstatic to abject; the idiom is constantly sliding, smearing, merging to connect phenomena and feeling in work that opens a new approach in the ecological awareness currently driving poetry on both sides of the Atlantic.
Seiler has effectively rewired the lyric for the twenty-first century, tuning the dial of the poetic to its lower frequencies, where the signal can pass through walls.«
Joshua Weiner, Poetry magazine

»Lutz Seiler reaches the level of a Thomas Pynchon here. […]
This is atmospherically rich, true world literature. World literature is, after all, that which lets me see the world with different eyes, which shows me a part of the world I have not seen before.
And this is what Seiler manages to do in Star 111.«
Denis Scheck, SWR lesenswert