Author Reading | Me, In Between: The Refugee and the Coming-of-Age Novel

A conversation among the author and current writer-in-residence Julya Rabinowich, the author and translator Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and the acclaimed translator Tess Lewis on two novels exploring the young adult experience – Rabinowich's Me, In Between and Silvana Gandolfi's Run for Your Life. The conversation will touch upon the literary importance of coming-of-age novels, the refugee experience in Austria and Europe, and children forced to make decisions in an adult world.

Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin, Maja Haderlap, Philippe Jaccottet, and Christine Angot. Her awards include the 2016 ACFNY Translation Prize, the 2017 PEN Translation Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is co-chair of the PEN Translation Committee and an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review. In 2014 and 2015, Tess Lewis curated Festival Neue Literatur, New York City’s annual festival of German-language literature in English, which featured Julya Rabinowich in 2010.

Julya Rabinowich, born in 1970 in St. Petersburg, has lived in Vienna since 1977, where she also studied. She studied painting, philosophy, and translation and works as a writer, columnist, painter, and interpreter. Her debut novel, Spaltkopf, published first by Edition Exil in 2008 and reissued by Deuticke in 2011 won the Rauriser Literaturpreis 2009 alongside several grants. It was published in English by Portobello Books in 2011 under the title Splithead in a translation by Tess Lewis.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz has published twenty-five books of fiction, nonfiction, essays, poetry, and translation. Her reviews and criticism have appeared in many leading magazines and newspapers. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Foundation for the Arts, and has taught in writing programs in the United States and abroad. She is presently on the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars at Bennington College.