Kurt Drawert: Die große Abwesenheit

This collection of new essays develops the themes and motifs that lie deep at the heart of Kurt Drawert’s literature: an exploration of the complex areas of interface between body, language, and power within the subject and the threat to the individual that can be extrapolated from this. A second section focuses on literature as a place where the subject is free. But this begs the question “What is literature?” In this attempt at a topology, the author devises a poetological matrix for his own work, a place where production and reflection coexist alongside one another. Talks and conversations round out the theoretical positions and use specific subject matter to carry them forward.
Kurt Drawert has authored novels, poems, and essays and has received multiple awards for his work, most recently the Lessing Prize of the Free State of Saxony (2017), the Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Prize (2020), and the Walter Kempowski Prize for Biographical Literature (2021). He lives in Darmstadt.