Join Maja Haderlap, author of Angel of Oblivion, for a lecture hosted by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University!

Maja Haderlap is an Austrian-Slovene novelist, poet, playwright, and Translator. She studied German language and literature at the University of Vienna and has a PhD in Theatre Studies. She was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, the Ravensburger Verlag Foundation Prize, and France’s First Novel Prize for her debut novel Engel des Vergessens (Angel of Oblivion).

Angel of Oblivion is based on the experiences of Maja Haderlap’s family and the Slovenian-speaking minority in southern Austria, many of whom fought as partisans against the Nazis during the Second World War. The story centers on the experiences of a young girl learning to navigate the terrain between two hostile communities and two extremely burdened languages: Slovenian, a language of heroic resistance and continued humiliation, and German, an escape from her stifling rural upbringing but also the language of the camps which her grandmother barely survived and many other family members didn’t. Engaging with themes of tolerance and integration of minority communities, the burden of history, the effects of conflicts on survivors and their children, and language’s role in shaping identity, Haderlap’s novel strikes at problems of paramount importance to our world today. Translated from the German by Tess Lewis, Angel of Oblivion is forthcoming from Archipelago Books in August 2016.

Archipelago Books would like to thank the Austrian Cultural Forum for making this event a reality through their generous efforts and collaboration.