Biography
Poet, novelist and essayist Lutz Seiler was born in Gera, Thuringia, in 1963 and today lives in Wilhelmshorst, near Berlin, and in Stockholm. After an apprenticeship in construction, he worked as a carpenter and bricklayer. Since 1997, he has been the literary director and custodian of the Peter Huchel Haus. His writing has won many prizes, include the Ingeborg Bachmann and the German Book Prize, and been translated into twenty-five languages. His prize-winning second novel Star 111, his volume of non-fiction In Case Of Loss, and the poetry collection Pitch and Glint, his important first major poetry collection, are published simultaneously in English by And Other Stories. Some of his stories, poems and essays have appeared in English in the journals The White Review, Poetry, Modern Poetry in Translation and PN Review.
Reviews
Michael Hofmann
‘Pitch and Glint resists description but compels shock, admiration and envy. It has something of the amphibrachic chant of early Celan, jolie-laide language, lower case, ampersands, a harsh and physical sampling of a childhood in a working landscape (the uranium mines) in the last years of the GDR.’
Michael Krüger
‘Pitch and Glint was an event, because all of us who still believe poetry can do something, felt that something was being given voice by this poet, something that would otherwise have been hopelessly lost.’
Angelika Overath
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
‘Epoch-making.’
Ursula Krechel
Der Tagesspiegel
‘Seiler's poems are original. They have body and a rhythm. They breathe dust and dirt, the desolation in minds and homes, the collapse and change, but their form is so strong that something new arises.’
Helmut Böttiger
Frankfurter Rundschau
‘Here the contemporary appears with archaic force.’
Lothar Müller
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
‘Seiler is not aiming at reportage, not a documentary recording of places and landscapes. He is after the images with which they are internalised: how they get into people's bones. [...] Distrustful of fixed rhyming schemes, he throws his lines like garlands over the sentence structures, playing with internal rhyme and alliteration, closer to Dylan Thomas than Peter Huchel. This slim, wonderful book is like a seashell: a part of Germany is enclosed in it, in a rush of sound.’
Martin Ahrends
Die Zeit
‘Seiler's art is an inbetween one. Pitch and Glint remains a secret until you find a way in, reading it as an evocation and as a challenge to move in echoing sounds.’
More Praise for Lutz Seiler's Poetry
‘Seiler has masterful command of a subtle style, both skittish and firm in its diction and movement, tense and tensile in its branching extensions and jittery vertiginous drops. One could call it elliptical, but it’s more a kind of binocular vision, with one lens ground for cosmic focus and the other for a microscope. The voicing of such vision shifts from ecstatic to abject; the idiom is constantly sliding, smearing, merging to connect phenomena and feeling in work that opens a new approach in the ecological awareness currently driving poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. Seiler has effectively rewired the lyric for the twenty-first century, tuning the dial of the poetic to its lower frequencies, where the signal can pass through walls.’ Joshua Weiner, Poetry magazine
Sibylle Cramer
Süddeutsche Zeitung
‘It is never about reconstructing. Memory does not bring back what was forgotten. Indeed, the person who remembers doesn't even know for sure that what is remembered ever existed. . . Seiler's inimitable style as a storyteller, the wilful waywardness and weight of what he has to say, the intensity (and personal tact) of his engagement with the landscapes of others' poetries and lives all make these essays a lively portrait of the writer surrounded by his library. Seiler sets standards for reflection in art today. At the same time, he gives us a sense of the pagan-sacramental importance of objects in poetry.’
Christine Lecerf
Le Monde des livres
It took Lutz Seiler, born in East Germany, thirty years to give to the moment [of the Fall of the Berlin Wall] the full richness of fertile and ambiguous human experience. With its ample narrative and powerful imagination, Star 111 is the “Wenderoman” par excellence, the great novel of the “turn”, as German reunification is called.’
Frédérique Fanchette
Libération
‘The Berlin of Star 111 wakes a longing for a city like no other. You want to linger there in the squatted Assel bar where workers, hookers and departing Soviet soldiers cross paths with anarchists full of ideas.’
Cécile Dutheil de la Rochère
AOC
‘The presence of objects have is no doubt one of the most extraordinary things about Star 111. Everything is unique, everything has a price, everything is respected because it is the fruit of work or of making. Nothing is thrown away, everything kept. What if the objects have a soul? Read Star 111 (the title is the name of an East German transistor radio) and understand the real value of an object.’
Denis Scheck
SWR lesenswert
‘Lutz Seiler reaches the level of a Thomas Pynchon here. […] This is atmospherically rich, true world literature. World literature is, after all, that which lets me see the world with different eyes, which shows me a part of the world I have not seen before. And this is what Seiler manages to do in Star 111.’
Ijoma Mangold
DIE ZEIT
‘Star 111 reveals the fiery nucleus of everything political, its dual nature: the unity of poetic rapture and the mysticism of the revolution. […] Lutz Seiler has the ability to describe the ridiculous, overheated and even the unconscionable of that political romanticism without having to denounce the original impulse. That’s what makes Star 111 great literature.’
Paul Jandl
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
‘Star 111 is a novel full of hard-hitting, deeply moving psychology, full of scenes in which people shake the foundations of a reality that is in the process of creating new laws for itself.’
Thomas Steinfeld
Süddeutsche Zeitung
‘The [goat in the novel], the reader understands, knows neither longing nor nostalgia. The fact that the novel shares, in this regard, the view of a goat, is its last and biggest virtue.’
Jan Wiele
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
For the second time now Lutz Seiler has achieved something rather extraordinary: to talk about how one actually leads a poetic existence, a matter that is as euphoric as it is cruel, in a novel that is “accessible” in the best sense of the word.’
Jona Nietfeld
Der Tagesspiegel
‘Lutz Seiler talks about a city and a time that seemed to have been exhausted in fiction. But he creates a new fascination.’
Anja Maier
die tageszeitung
‘It has been a long time since anyone has talked about those foggy years, glossed over with garish colours by other writers scores of times, more movingly than Lutz Seiler.’
Der Spiegel
‘Seiler tells a story of freedom in a poetically-precise style.’
Helmut Böttiger
Deutschlandfunk Kultur
‘This is much more than a historical novel. It condenses an era and invokes the great panoramas of consciousness of modernity in a highly independent way.’
Bayerischer Rundfunk
‘This unexpected novel about post-reunification from the partially decayed, far from gentrified Berlin convinces with its unique atmospheric density, its gentle irony and the devotion to the matter at hand.’
Katja Weise
NDR Kultur
‘With Star 111, Lutz Seiler presents a great novel that talks enchantingly about departures and downfalls, about social utopias and societal realities, about humiliation and pride. Fascinating.’
Roland Gutsch
Nordkurier
‘What distinguishes it from the many Berlin-Reunification-books is that there is not a trace of caricature, no manipulative narrative, but still captivating entertainment.’
Praise for Lutz Seiler's Pitch and Glint
‘Pitch and Glint resists description but compels shock, admiration and envy. It has something of the amphibrachic chant of early Celan, jolie-laide language, lower case, ampersands, a harsh and physical sampling of a childhood in a working landscape (the uranium mines) in the last years of the GDR.’ Michael Hofmann
‘Pitch and Glint was an event, because all of us who still believe poetry can do something, felt that something was being given voice by this poet, something that would otherwise have been hopelessly lost.’ Michael Krüger
‘Epoch-making.’ Angelika Overath, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
‘Seiler's poems are original. They have body and a rhythm. They breathe dust and dirt, the desolation in minds and homes, the collapse and change, but their form is so strong that something new arises.’ Ursula Krechel, Der Tagesspiegel
‘Here the contemporary appears with archaic force.’ Helmut Böttiger, Frankfurter Rundschau
‘Seiler is not aiming at reportage, not a documentary recording of places and landscapes. He is after the images with which they are internalised: how they get into people's bones. [...] Distrustful of fixed rhyming schemes, he throws his lines like garlands over the sentence structures, playing with internal rhyme and alliteration, closer to Dylan Thomas than Peter Huchel. This slim, wonderful book is like a seashell: a part of Germany is enclosed in it, in a rush of sound.’ Lothar Müller, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
‘Seiler's art is an inbetween one. Pitch and Glint remains a secret until you find a way in, reading it as an evocation and as a challenge to move in echoing sounds.’ Martin Ahrends, Die Zeit