Authors
Alissa Walser Novelist Germany
“When I was twenty I studied Visual Arts in NYC. I was mainly painting, large scale, non-figurative, oil. When I returned to Europe six years later I started to concentrate on drawing. I changed scale and materials and did little ball-pen drawings of the human figure. I realized that this was a kind of story-telling and started to write stories down.
The three books I’ve published so far combine image and text. I find it a very powerful combination. Thematically I am interested in the stories people tell themselves about who they are in this world and how these stories re-affect their lives. So far I have published three books and two theatre-plays. My first book was a picture-book, Wedding of Dreams (Traumhochzeit)(1990), a story that I illustrated with large colourful pictures. The other two books are short-stories: “This is Not My Whole Story” (Dies ist nicht meine ganze Geschichte) (1990) and “The Smaller Half of the World” (Die kleinere Hälfte der Welt) (2000). They also contain images, but these images I don’t consider to be illustrations. They are small linear drawings that add something to the stories which can’t be found in the text itself. The short-stories and plays deal with relationships between people, between man and women, with the body and with living in modern cities at a time, when traditions and conventions have vanished and each individual has to make own decisions and find his or her own scale.”
Born in 1961, writer and translator Alissa has studied Visual Art in Vienna and New York. She received the Bettina-von-Arnim Prize and the Ingeborg-Bachmann Prize in 1992.
Participation Program
Round Table 3 Newness in my literature
Round Table 2 Newness in my literature
Round Table 1 Newness in my literature