This is a hybrid event organised by the APGRD, co-hosted with the Department of German, University of Oxford. This event is free and open to all. Please go to the APGRD website for more details and to access the Zoom link to join us online.
A reading from Josephine Balmer’s Things We Leave Behind (ed. by Paschalis Nikolaou, Shearsman 2025) and Ulrike Draesner’s penelope’s cr()ft: a postepic (German original: penelopes sch()ff: postepos, Penguin 2025), followed by a conversation of the two authors with Karen Leeder.
Josephine Balmer is a poet, classical translator, research scholar and literary critic. Her published works include the acclaimed translation Sappho: Poems and Fragments (1984, 1986 & 1992), and Classical Women Poets (1996). Her most recent volume, Things We Leave Behind: Selected Poems (2025) was edited by Paschalis Nikolaou and named one of the ‘Observer Best Poetry Books’ of 2025.
Ulrike Draesner is a freelance writer living in Berlin and in Leipzig, where she has been director of the German Literature Institute Leipzig since 2018. She has received many awards, most recently the Grand Prize of the German Literature Fund 2021 and the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in the summer of 2024 along with the Gisela Elsner Literature Prize and the Christine Lavant Prize for penelopes sch()ff: postepos (English: penelope’s cr()ft: a postepic), published by Penguin in 2025.
Karen Leeder is a writer, translator and Schwarz-Taylor Chair of German Language Literature at the University of Oxford. She teaches and publishes especially on modern and contemporary poetry and is currently PI on the project ‘AfterWords’ with an Einstein Visiting Fellowship at the FU, Berlin.
