Ulrike Almut Sandig

Translated by Karen Leeder.
Published by Seagull Books 2023.
Read some poems of it on Versopolis.
Shortlisted by the American Literary Translation Association (ALTA) for the 2024 National Translation Award in Poetry

„Ulrike Almut Sandig’s surreal, incisive, playful poems are translated from the German by Karen Leeder, whose nimble versions keep pace with the dives and swings in theme and style.“ Sylee Gore on Poetry Foundation. Read the full review here

In the beginning was the light, or was it the Lumières? In Ulrike Almut Sandig’s latest volume of poetry, it is only a leap from the creation of the world to the symphony of the Berlin metropolis. And there is a question holding out off the coast of Lampedusa: Can shining sheep be used as night storage for the dark hours, when we are overwhelmed with fears of God, of a gym teacher with a whistle, of mothers with eyes as black as coal? In devastating sequences, Sandig charts the reality of an abused child, victims of contemporary war, or a fourteenth-century Madonna. Full of humor, musicality, lightness, and rage, Shining Sheep is not just visual poetry—it has loops in your ear and filmic explosions of imagery for all your senses.

Translated by Karen Leeder
Published by Seagullbooks, 2022.
Longlisted for Dublin Literary Award 2024. 

Ruth is a concert pianist and often booked and on the road. Privatly she suffers from a difficult relationship with her violent boyfriend Voitto. In throwbacks we learn about her childhood in the opencast mining area of Saxony during the time of the GDR, overshadowed by sexual abuse and violence. Only Viktor, her long time friend, knows what has happened to Ruth. After the peaceful revolution in 1989 he becomes a Skinhead `til he manage to change his mindset. Viktor moves to Paris and gets payrolled by a wealthy family. When Ruth arrives in Paris to play a gig we’ve come full circle. Monster is the first novel by Ulrike Almut Sandig. The slightly dark story makes one think about what abuse and violence causes in a child. In a way this novel is also a tribute to music as an universal cure.

‘[A] musicality, together with the compelling narrative, makes Monsters Like Us a novel to be read and re-read; one discovers different layers of meaning on revisiting the text. Though pervaded by melancholy, it offers some hope for a better future, at least in the figure of Ruth. Far from being the “dummy-doll” of her childhood, she ultimately finds the strength to rebel and stand up for herself.’— Fiona Graham, Litro. Read the full review here.

Poems. 80 pages.
Translated by Karen Leeder
Published by Seagull Books 2020.

Karen Leeder’s translation of Ulrike Almut Sandig’s innovative 2016 poetry collection allows space for a startling variety of distinct speakers. Characters from Grimm fairy tales wait beside voices recognisable from present-day bus-stop and street. The fairy tale theme (wolves, Hansel and Gretel) runs throughout this collection, the first half of which deals boldly with conflict and war crimes in recent memory. Leeder shapes a polyphonic work where Fitcher’s bird bathes in honey before butchery and priests lift from the ground. The title of this book is a beauty in itself, making it an excellent clue to what lies within.—Judges’ citation for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize (Shortlisted)

Poems. 36 pages.
Translated by Karen Leeder.
Published by Hurst Street Press Oxford London 2018.

Order your signed copy here.

This cycle refers to The Children’s and Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm, first published in two volumes in 1812 and 1815 by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. It reanimates the dark side of Grimm and uses it as a backdrop for a very contemporary European concerns: war, migration, the rise of the Right.

Karen Leeder is a writer, critic and translator. She is Professor of Modern German Literature at New College, Oxford. In 2015 she was awarded the English PEN translation Pitch for her translation of Ulrike Almut Sandig’s poetry. Here’s to her website.

Thick of it (Poems)

Poems. 80 pages. Published by Seagull Books Calcutta New York London 2018
Translated by Karen Leeder
Read the review on Asymptote (It’s worth scrolling down).
Order here.

The poems of Ulrike Almut Sandig are at once simple and fantastic. This new collection finds her on her way to imaginary territories. Thick of It charts a journey through two hemispheres to “the center of the world” and navigates a “thicket” that is at once the world, the psyche, and language itself. The poems explore an urgently urban reality, but that reality is interwoven with references to nightmares, the Bible, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes—all overlaid with a finely tuned longing for a disappearing world. The old names are forgotten, identities fall away; things disappear from the kitchen; everything is sliding away. Powerful themes emerge, but always mapped onto the local, the fractured individual in “the thick of it” all. This is language at its most crafted and transformative, blisteringly contemporary, but with a kind of austerity, too. By turns comic, ironic, skeptical, nostalgic, these poems are also profoundly musical, exploiting multiple meanings and stretching syntax, so that the audience is constantly kept guessing, surprised by the next turn in the line.

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In Music

Landschaft

Beatz & Verses with Grigory Semenchuk.
Music CD. 45 minutes. Published Schöffling & Co Frankfurt am Main 2018.
Produced by Klangkosmonauten Berlin 2018.

Listen online
Order album
Review by Oleksandr Kobalchuk (You will need Google translate)

Landschaft aka Grigory Semenchuk (Lviv) & Ulrike Almut Sandig (Berlin) stirr their German and Ukrainian poems with hip hop, elektropunk and pop music. Enjoy the sound of poetry.

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In a Workshop

Translation Workshop at Queen’s College in Oxford (UK) for the literary magazine Modern poetry in Translation:

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In a Postbox

For further information on the author, bookings and to
aquire rights please contact the publishing house:

Schöffling & Co.
Kaiserstraße 79
D-60329 Frankfurt am Main

Dr. Vera Kostial
Telefon: +49 69 – 92 07 87 25
E-Mail: vera.kostial[at]schoeffling.de