Judith Hermann was born in Berlin in 1970. Her debut book, Summer House, Later (1998), was greeted with great acclaim. The short-story collection Nothing but Ghosts followed in 2003. Some of these stories were adapted for film in 2007. In 2009 Hermann published the internationally acclaimed Alice, a collection of five short stories. In 2014 she brought out her first novel, Where Love Begins. This was followed in 2016 by the collection Lettipark, which won the Danish Blixen Prize for short stories. Hermann’s work has been honoured with numerous prizes, including the Kleist Prize and the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize. In spring 2021, she published the novel Home, which was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and awarded the Bremen Literature Prize 2022. Hermann lives and writes in Berlin.
Spiegel Bestseller and nominated for the 2021 Leipzig Book Fair Prize.
“Home”
In her new novel Home, Judith Hermann tells of a departure and an awakening: an old world is lost and a new one arises.
The protagonist has left her former life behind, moved to the seaside, into her own house. She writes short letters to her ex-husband, telling him how her new life is going in the north. She cautiously makes friends, tries having an affair, wonders whether she could make herself at home or whether she should move on. Hermann tells of a woman who leaves many things behind, develops resilience and becomes someone else in the intense landscape of the coast. She tells of memory. And of that moment when life divides, an old world is lost and a new one emerges.
