U.S. Embassy Literature Series

Where Do Novels Come From? Lauren Groff and Lorrie Moore in Conversation with Gregor Dotzauer

Tickets: €10 at tickets@etberlin.de or +49 (30) 6911 211
For free admission for school groups; please register by April 12 with USEmbassyCultureRSVP@state.gov

Lauren Groff is the Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in spring 2023. She is the author of six books of fiction, the most recent the novel MATRIX (September 2021). Her work has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, and France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne, was a three-time finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and twice for the Kirkus Prize and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Lorrie Moore is currently the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow in Fiction at the American Academy in Berlin in spring 2023, and the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and Creative Writing at Vanderbilt University. Moore is the author of two short story collections, three novels and a children’s novel. Her new novel I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home (June 2023) has been listed as one of the most anticipated books of 2023 by Time Magazine. Moore has won numerous awards such as the O. Henry Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction.  She has been a finalist for the Orange Prize, PEN Faulkner Award, National Book Critics’ Circle Award, The Story Prize, and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. See What Can Be Done (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018) is a collection of her reviews and essays that previously appeared in publications such as New York Review of Books, New Yorker, Yale Review, and The Atlantic. A recipient of an NEA, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, the Berlin Prize, and a Pushcart Prize, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006.

Gregor Dotzauer is lead editor for nonfiction at Berlin’s Tagesspiegel.  He studied German, philosophy, and musicology in Würzburg and Frankfurt am Main before beginning to write about literature and film for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeit, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. In 1999, he joined Berlin’s Tagesspiegel as literary editor, where he also regularly writes on topics related to jazz or the humanities. In 2009, he received the Alfred Kerr Prize for Literary Criticism. In October 2022, Matthes & Seitz published his literary essay Schläft ein Lied in allen Dingen – Über Musik, Moment und Erinnerung.

In cooperation with the U.S. Embassy Berlin and the English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center