On the Death of Sibylle Lewitscharoff
News14.05.2023
»Sibylle Lewitscharoff was an exceptional writer.
Her mission was to re-enchant the world and rob death of its terror.«
Björn Hayer, Die Zeit
Suhrkamp Verlag mourns the loss of Sibylle Lewitscharoff, who died on May 13, 2023, at the age of 69, in Berlin.
Sibylle Lewitscharoff was born in Stuttgart in 1954 and read religious studies in Berlin. After university, she spent some time in Buenos Aires and Paris; subsequently, she moved back to Berlin and initially worked as an accountant. After publishing her first radio features, radio plays and essays, Lewitscharoff was awarded the 1998 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for her story Pong. In the wake of the literary publicity that followed, she published various novels, including Der Höfliche Harald (1999), Montgomery (2003) and Consummatus (2006).
Sibylle Lewitscharoff has received numerous awards for her work, among them the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for her novel Apostoloff in 2009 and the Georg Büchner Prize in 2013. She became a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry and the Berlin Academy of Arts in 2007.
Most recently, Insel Verlag published the volume Warum Dante?, in which Lewitscharoff presents an illustrated introduction to Dante Alighieri’s masterwork Divine Comedy.
»In her books, however, Sibylle Lewitscharoff lends her characters all the emphasis of her virtuosity and all the pleasure of her baroque-coloured fabulosity. With the mad Pong or the furious narrator of Apostoloff, she has created characters whose eccentricity combines the
bitter hilarity of Shakespearean fools with the melancholy of lost, outcast existences:
And from this they draw their defiant self-assertion.«
Roman Bucheli, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
»The world is rough ... if we can’t believe, in angels, that is, in beauty, in hate and in the
amazing works of Sibylle Lewitscharoff.«
Die Zeit
»Sibylle Lewitscharoff is a temptress of language.«
Joachim Dicks, NDR
»Lewitscharoff's art is to merge realistic storytelling with the sphere of the surreal so nonchalantly that even the world beyond the rationally perceptible appears entirely rational and believable.«
Sigrid Löffler
bitter hilarity of Shakespearean fools with the melancholy of lost, outcast existences:
And from this they draw their defiant self-assertion.«
Roman Bucheli, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
»The world is rough ... if we can’t believe, in angels, that is, in beauty, in hate and in the
amazing works of Sibylle Lewitscharoff.«
Die Zeit
»Sibylle Lewitscharoff is a temptress of language.«
Joachim Dicks, NDR
»Lewitscharoff's art is to merge realistic storytelling with the sphere of the surreal so nonchalantly that even the world beyond the rationally perceptible appears entirely rational and believable.«
Sigrid Löffler