Anna Mendelssohn Reader
Book presentation and readings with David Grundy, Beatrice Hilke & Vera Lutz, Lotta Thießen
Sunday, April 14, 2024
4 pm
The Anna Mendelssohn Reader is dedicated to the work of British poet and artist Anna Mendelssohn (1948–2009). The publication will be presented at Kunstverein München in the context of a series of readings and recitations by a group of fellow writers and poets who have engaged with Mendelssohn's work in a variety of ways. The reader itself is the result of a collective engagement with her “anti-confessional life writing” and comprises a selection of previously published poems and secondary literature as well as (auto-)biographical notes, new translations of her poems, and selected artistic works that have rarely been published.
After serving a five year prison sentence for her association with the radical leftist group Angry Brigade in the early 1970s, Mendelssohn subsequently withdrew from political groups and devoted herself entirely to art and writing. Like her life, Mendelssohn’s poems are shaped by modes of refusal. Her writing often hovers on the edges of communicability yet testifies to a consistent belief in the transformative power of aesthetic form. Mendelssohn composed over 700 notebooks, which are now held in the University of Sussex archives in Brighton.
The event is organized by Beatrice Hilke and Vera Lutz.
Image: Anna Mendelssohn Reader, eds. Beatrice Hilke and Vera Lutz (Berlin: midnight ink), 2023.
The project is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.