Iris Radisch is a German literature-journalist. Since 1990 she has written for the mass-circulation weekly newspaper, Die Zeit. More recently she has come to wider prominence through her television work.
Biography
Iris Radisch was born in West Berlin. She attended university at Frankfurt and Tübingen, studying Germanistics, Romance studies and Philosophy. She then moved into journalism, working as a literary editor with the Frankfurter Rundschau, a mass-market daily newspaper. Her switch to Die Zeit came in 1990. As a regular contributor to the paper's Feuilleton section she gained a reputation as a perceptive, original, but sometimes also starkly polemical literature critic, able to deliver her judgments with a rare level of authority. She was able to combine her journalism with guest professorships, notably at St. Louis and at Göttingen. She also began to appear as a television moderator in discussion programmes transmitted by ZDF, ARD, WDR and the private-sector broadcaster VOX. Her public profile rose after August 2000 when she began her involvement with :de:Das Literarische Quartett|"Das Literarische Quartett", a weekly television programme produced by West Germany's ZDF broadcasting operator in collaboration with Austria's ORF. The programme presented book reviews provided by a permanent panel of four literary critics. Radisch took the place vacated through the well publicised resignation from the programme of Sigrid Löffler. She remained a panel member till December 2001 when the series came to an end. She also participated in a number of subsequent "one-off" episodes transmitted during 2005 and 2006 to celebrate anniversaries of Friedrich Schiller, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Heine und Bertolt Brecht. During 2002/2003 she teamed up with the philosopher-journalist :de:Gert Scobel|Gert Scobel, the longstanding moderator of the television arts magazine :de:Kulturzeit|Kulturzeit, as an alternate presenter of the literary radio programme "Bücher, Bücher" from Hessischer Rundfunk. From August 2006 till September 2012 she "fronted" Swiss Television's :de:Club |Literturclub show in succession to Roger Willemsen. Between 1995 and 2000 Radisch served on the jury for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, a literary prize centred on German language literature and awarded each year, since 1977, in Klagenfurt. She returned to the prize jury a few years later, chairing it between 2003 and 2007. In 2007 Iris Radisch published her first book, "Die Schule der Frauen". It was not the first time :fr:L'École des femmes|the title :fr:L'École des femmes |had been used, but Radisch's book covers and builds on more contemporary and pressing themes than the similarly titled works of Molière and Gide. "I have three children and one professional job and I am not a believer in simple solutions" . The author illuminates her own experience of sustaining a professional career with her "career" as a mother of three small children by two different men. She "exposes modern myths" about the compatibility of family and profession. She discusses the semi-detached contributions of fathers. Since April 2013, jointly with :de:Adam Soboczynski|Adam Soboczynski, she has headed up Die Zeit's Feuilleton section.
