Hermann Hesse Award for Emerging Talent

Silke Scheuermann – Rich Girls

fiction

164pp (35,400 words)

read an extract

>> Winner of the Grimmelshausen Award for Emerging Talent
>> Winner of the George Konell Award
>> Winner of the Droste Award for Emerging Talent

In seven luminous stories of love and loss, loneliness and desperation, Silke Scheuermann’s debut collection paints a vivid and poignant picture of a generation searching for identity. Unfulfilled desire, stalled communication, and the vagaries of memory are the themes woven through the spare stories in this book.

Franziska should be happy really. She is young, pretty and in a functioning relationship. But an obsessive amour fou has made a prisoner of her, turned her into a submissive sacrificial animal. Every day she waits for Simon, her married man, to arrive; she decorates the apartment festively, buys flowers for him, and whisky. Yet Franziska’s love for Simon is proven a fiction, and her life a crisis area.
Silke Scheuermann’s stories veer to the uncanny; her heroes become entangled in the invisible trap of their own existence, an existence characterised by dissatisfaction.

Silke Scheuermann is rightly regarded as one of Germany’s most significant contemporary poets. She is the author of two poetry collections, The Day When The Seabirds Sang In Two Voices (Suhrkamp, 2001), and The Most Endearing Point in Space (Suhrkamp, 2004). This background beautifully translates into a dense prose, full of evocative images, that still seems effortless. In contrast to the momentousness of the content, Scheuermann’s tone is relaxed and playful. The way she moulds language, as poetic as she is precise, creates a rich reading experience. Her eagerly anticipated prose debut REICHE MÄDCHEN is an ironic, laconic, amusing and razor-sharp depiction of a generation desirous of the ordinary while yearning for the out-of-the-ordinary.

»Silke Scheuermann masters the high art of contemporary writing, capturing the particular climate, that special flavour of the present in her prose as well as in her poetry, making it more tangible and perceivable than in our daily routine.
Silke Scheuermann is an original poet, a ravishingly sensual narrator writing a lean, clearly structured, gently ironical and lively prose. Over and above, Silke Scheuermann is a highly intelligent and gifted author and a keen observer of her time and contemporaries.«
Georg Konell Award, laudatio by Uwe Wittstock

Rights sold

China (Chinese simple) - New Star
Estonia - Pegasus
Italy - Voland
The Netherlands - Cossée
Russia – Centrepolygraph
Sweden - Weyler
Syria (Arabic, World) - Cadmus
Thai (first serial) – Circle

paperback - Goldmann

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Reviews

»Silke Scheuermann is a big talent, she is one of German literature’s great hopes – hence hope for us readers to learn more about us and our times. A brilliant piece of literature. Not since Judith Hermann’s stories did I read anything so beautiful.«
Die Welt - Book of the Week

»Silke Scheuermann is among the few poets who sense and embrace the challenge of turning prose into poetry in these entirely unpoetic days.«
Süddeutsche Zeitung

»One of the most talented young authors...Happiness and similar illusions of life cannot possibly be put into more beautiful words than these.«
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»Every single sentence breathes poetry.«
Brigitte

»With flying colors, Silke Scheuermann passes the tightrope walk to great fiction.«
Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten

»A downright pamphlet for having doubts about others and oneself, for the continuous struggle against one’s own emotions and the ever-present fear of the abyss of love.« die tageszeitung

»Poetic and concise prose, a brilliant portrayal of characters persistently attempting to wrest a piece of happiness from today’s life.« Neue Presse

»A work of striking imaginative power.«
Frankfurter Rundschau

»Intelligent, humorous, ironical ... Prose that goes under the skin.«
Aachener Zeitung

»Scheuermann’s prose shines pleasently out of the usual mass of young women’s fiction, maintaining an elegant balance between reality and the absurd; capturing the wonderous, sad and eerie twists of everyday life.«
Nürnberger Zeitung

»A remarkable debut.«
Stuttgarter Zeitung

»Great expectations and salutary frustration go side by side, seducing the reader. (...) Scheuermann delves into the hearts and the worn souls of her characters, accompanies them on their meandering search for love that all to often leads into a dead end.« Wiener Zeitung

»Laconic and precise prose. (...) Scheuermann places her emphasis with admirable restraint.« Nürnberger Nachrichten

»There are several successful women writers in Germany who inspire a wide audience with their soulful, ironic and cutting-edge stories - Judith Herrmann, Julia Franck or Alissa Walser, to name but a few. Now Silke Scheuermann has risen straight into that league.«
Giessener Allgemeine

»Zsuzsa Bánk's favourite book.«
Madame

»These seven stories are literary jewels. Scheuermann proves herself a master of the erotic narrative à la Maupassant.«
De Volkskrant

»In her confident writing style, Scheuermann gets right to the point. Her choice of words is accurate, her expression refreshing and highly imaginitive, yet accessible.«
Vrij Nederland

»Here comes another young German author that commands our admiration.«
VPRO

»Reveals the close relation between modern young women’s saturated lifestyle, and the lack of emotion.«
De Telegraaf

About the author

Silke Scheuermann born in 1973, lives in Frankfurt am Main. Her poems and short stories have won her various grants and awards, among them the Leonce and Lena Award, the Literature Scholarship at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, the Hermann Hesse Award for Emerging Talent, the Scholarship at Casa Baldi in Italy from the Deutsche Akademie, the Literature Scholarship by Deutscher Literaturfonds in New York. She received a special recommendation by the Jury of the ZDF aspekte Literature Award and most recently the Grimmelshausen Award for Emerging Talent, George Konell Award, Dorste Award for Emerging Talent, and a one-year scholarship at the Villa Massimo, Rome.
Silke Scheuermann is on the Jury for the prestigious Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and was visiting lecturer at the Deutsches Literaturinstitut in Leipzig (DLL) and at the University of Mainz.

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