Ulrike Draesner is a German author. She was awarded the 2016 Nicolas Born Prize.
Life and work
The daughter of an architect, Ulrike Draesner grew up in Munich, Germany. She received a Bavarian State scholarship for the best performing student at Gymnasium from the :de:Stiftung Maximilianeum|Stiftung Maximilianeum. She read Law, English and German literature as well as Philosophy in Munich, Salamanca, and Oxford. She worked as a lecturer Institute for German Philology from 1989 to 1993. In 1992, she received her doctorate for a dissertation on the Middle High German romance Parzival. In 1993, Ulrike Draesner quit her academic career in order to work as a full-time author. She has lived in Berlin since 1994, writing both poetry and prose. Her novel Vorliebe is a romance novel. In 2014, her groundbreaking novel Sieben Sprünge vom Rand der Welt was published and a celebrated success. Draesner frequently collaborates in cross-media projects with other artists and merges literature with sculpting, performing arts, and music. She became a member of the :de:PEN-Zentrum Deutschland|PEN-Zentrum Deutschland in 1999. In 2010, she was elected to a Fellowship at the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts. She is a regular guest at international literary festivals, and currently serves on the prize jury at the Irseer Pegasus. Her work has been translated into numerous languages. During the academic year 2015/16, Ulrike Draesner will be a Visiting Fellow at New College, Oxford, working with Karen Leeder, leader of the Mediating Modernity project, on topics of bilingualism, poetry translation and negotiating identity as a Writer in residence at the Faculty for Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. A symposium on her and her work is planned for April 2016.
Publications
; Single author titles
Wege durch erzählte Welten. Intertextuelle Verweise als Mittel der Bedeutungskonstitution in Wolframs Parzival, dissertation, Frankfurt am Main 1993.
Gedächtnisschleifen, poetry, Frankfurt am Main 1995, revised edition Munich 2008.
Anis-o-trop, poetry, Hamburg 1997.
Lichtpause, novel, poetry 1998.
Reisen unter den Augenlidern, short stories, Klagenfurt 1999.
für die nacht geheuerte zellen, poetry, München 2001.
Bläuliche Sphinx, Berlin 2002.
Mitgift, novel, Munich 2002.
Hot Dogs, short stories, Munich 2004.
kugelblitz, poetry, Munich 2005.
Spiele, novel, Munich 2005.
Schöne Frauen lesen, essays, Luchterhand, Munich 2007, .
berührte orte, poetry, Luchterhand, Munich 2008,.
Vorliebe, novel, Luchterhand, Munich 2010,.
Richtig liegen. Geschichten in Paaren, short stories, Luchterhand, Munich 2011,.
Stephanie Catani, Friedhelm Marx : Familien - Geschlechter - Macht - Beziehungen im Werk Ulrike Draesners, Wallstein Verlag, 2008, 161 S.
Cornelia Saxe: Schöne Frauen lesen und schreiben – Die Ulrike-Draesner-Homestory, In: „Dünn ist die Decke der Zivilisation – Begegnungen zwischen Schriftstellerinnen“, Maike Stein, Ulrike Helmer Verlag, Frankfurt/M., 2007, S. 21 - 32,
Susanna Brogi, Text + Kritik 201 "Ulrike Draesner", Munich 2014
