Melinda Nadj Abonji at the HSG

31 October 2013. The three evenings will focus on the terms "voice", "narrating" and "narrating voice". The writer Melinda Nadj Abonji will cast more light on these terms with the help of text examples in order to then explore their connection with the musicality of a text.

The voice of a text
"I couldn’t imagine that people didn’t hear Schiller’s voice when they were reading him. You hear your own voice, says my German teacher, and she explained the difference between oral and written literature to me. I wasn’t convinced," says Nadj Abonji. By "voice", she means that language movement of a text. If you hear the voice of a text, you hear its rhythm, its tonality, the writer’s breath. The audience will be able to find out about this for themselves in the lectures.

German Book Prize Winner
Melinda Nadj Abonji, born in 1968 in the then Yugoslavia, read German studies and history at the University of Zurich. She describes herself as an author, a text performer and musician (violin and vocals). Nadj Abonji received numerous awards, one of them being the 2010 German Book Prize for her novel Tauben fliegen auf. She was the first Swiss woman writer to receive this award. The same title also earned Nadj Abonji the 2010 Swiss Book Prize. Melinda Nadj Abonji is a member of the "Autorinnen und Autoren der Schweiz" federation. She has staged numerous appearances as a text performer and written numerous contributions to literary journals.

The lectures will take place in the Post Office Building near St.Gallen Railway Station in the Raum für Literatur and will start on Thursdays at 6.15 p.m. Dates: 7, 14 and 21 November 2013.

Photo: Gaëtan Bally / Masterplanet