In the previous issue of Alluvium, Christine Lehnen wrote about the possibilities and limitations of post-national literature in Europe in the 21st century. As part of an ongoing research project, she is conducting expert interviews with practitioners to explore their stance on nationality and how it shapes (or fails to shape) their writing.
View More Post-National Authors, Post-National Literature? An Interview with David SzalayAuthor: Christine Lehnen
Christine Lehnen is a novelist and academic. Her research has been published in The Journal of Literary Theory and her short stories have been awarded the prizes of the Young Academies of Europe and the Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen. Since 2014, she has been teaching the Novel Writing Workshop at the University of Bonn. She has just completed her postgraduate degree of English Literatures and Cultures at the Universities of Bonn and Paris (III), and is finishing up a Master’s degree in Political Sciences. As C. E. Bernard and C. K. Williams, she publishes fantasy and suspense novels. She has studied in Paris, lived in the United States, Canada, Australia, and is currently based in Bonn.
European Literature—made in the UK?
In the novel All That Man Is (2016), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, nine protagonists travel the European continent, from Lille over Budapest to Copenhagen and beyond. The author, David Szalay, is quite a traveller himself: a Canadian citizen raised in London who is now based in Budapest and published in the United Kingdom. In 2013, he was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. But can such a book, or indeed such an author, be fully understood if considered only as a ‘British’?
View More European Literature—made in the UK?