Ulrike Almut Sandig

Prosa Performance Poesie

In Real Life

Ulrike Almut Sandig was born in the late GDR and now lives with her family in Berlin. She started publishing her poetry by pasting poems onto lamp posts in Leipzig and spreading them on flyers and free post cards. After completing her studies in Sociology of Religions and Modern Indology, she graduated from the German Creative Writing Program Leipzig. Story collections, pop music albums, radio pieces, various poetry collections and her novel „Monsters like us“ (Seagullbooks 2022) have been published to date. For her poetry performances she works with composers and performance artists, such as Hinemoana Baker (NZ), Alif (IND) and Grigory Semenchuk (UKR). She is frontwoman of the poetry collective Landschaft which stirrs up poetry, film and loop-based electronic music. In 2015 Ugly Duckling Presse (Brooklyn, USA) launched a selection of her early poems in Bradley Schmidt’s translation. In 2016 Karen Leeder’s stunning translations of Sandig’s latest poetry „Thick of it“ (Seagull Books, 2018) won the English PEN translation Pitch and have been awarded with an PEN America/Heim Translation Fund Grant. Her latest poems in English translation „I Am a Field Full of Rapeseed, Give Cover to Deer and Shine Like Thirteen Oil Paintings Laid One on Top of the Other“ reanimate the dark side of The Children’s and Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm and use it as a backdrop for contemporary European concerns: war, migration, the rise of the Right. Ulrike Almut Sandig is a member of the German PEN section.

„Ulrike Almut Sandig is a master storyteller who writes in beautiful poetic prose.“ New Books in German

More info about the author

In Film

Based on a poem by the German 19th century poet Friedrich Hölderlin.
POETRY, MUSIC & STARRING Ulrike Almut Sandig
ENGLISH TRANSLATION Karen Leeder
VIDEO PRODUCTION Sascha Conrad

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Based on a poem by Grigory Semenchuk.
GERMAN LYRICS Ulrike Almut Sandig
VIDEO PRODUCTION Èleonore Roedel & Beate Kunath

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In Poetry

I Am a Field Full of Rapeseed, Give Cover to Deer and Shine Like Thirteen Oil Paintings Laid One on Top of the Other

Poems. 80 pages. Translated by Karen Leeder Published by Seagull Books London New York Calcutta 2020.
Translated by Karen Leeder

Order here.

Ulrike Almut Sandig’s second volume of poems translated into English is a journey through a world that is imaginary yet entirely recognizable. Precise observation of the concrete is mixed with playful humour, inspired musicality and an anxious reckoning with undercurrents of violence. Migration, war, the rise of the new right, ecological threat, information overload and political apathy.
Yet the book is also animated by the passionate, expansive empathy—and reminds us what it is to be human. Always inventive, Sandig teases us here with multiple versions of the self, and multiple voices all in search of the origins of poetry in hidden places: in the silence before language, in the wings, in the field of rapeseed deep in the snow.

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Grimm.

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

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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. 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.
More info on Landschaft.
Read this review from 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 Prose

Buch gegen das Verschwinden (Against Disappearance)

Stories. Published by Schöffling & Co. Frankfurt / M. 2015.

Peter Thompson’s sample translation of the story „About our Absence“.
Review in New Books in German
More info & press comments

Amid the unrest in Istanbul’s Gezi Park, a young journalist tries to cast off the expectations of his mother, who was bitten by the travel bug after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. A hiker gets lost in the ancient, enchanted forests of the Engadine during a snowstorm. A little girl is flown by her grandmother to the end of the world during the transit of Venus. Where their traces lead is one of the many puzzles of these stories.

In her colourful and poetic prose, Ulrike Almut Sandig describes places that only appear to be gone. In reality they live on in the experiences of the elderly and the hopes of the younger generation. Relationships are buffeted by the storms of these stories, and deceptive certainties come unravelled. In her new book, Ulrike Almut Sandig uses the magic of storytelling to prevent whole worlds disappearing from our consciousness.

A short film by Harald Opel based on this book:

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Flamingos

Stories. Published by Schöffling & Co. Frankfurt / M. 2010. Paperback by S. Fischer. Frankfurt / Main 2012.

Review in New Books in German

More info & press comments

Anthea Bell’s translation of the title story in Five Dials no26.
Susan Bernofsky’s sample translation of the story „Mutabor“.