Birmingham Literature Festival: Diego Marani and Frank Witzel – Europanto, pop, politics and paranoia

Join Birmingham’s Literature Festival on 8 October at 1.30pm – 2.45pm! The event will be free of admission for visitors with a Europass! Don’t miss out and purchase your tickets today!

This event brings together two critically acclaimed writers from Germany and Italy, Frank Witzel and Diego Marani. The event will be chaired by literary critic, journalist and all-round champion of European writing, Nick Lezard  and supported by Frankfurt LiteraTurm and the Goethe-Institut London and is part of the Frankfurt Birmingham 50 years celebration.

Frank Witzel is an essayist and novelist, illustrator and musician. He is best known for his novel The Invention of the Red Army Faction by a Manic Depressive Teenager in the Summer of 1969, which won Germany’s most prestigious literature award, the German Book Prize in 2015. This novel, described as “a brilliant linguistic work of art that is a vast quarry of words and ideas – a hybrid compendium of pop, politics and paranoia” by critics, takes an enigmatic look at Cold War Germany seen through the eyes of a 13 year old boy.

Diego Marani is a celebrated Italian novelist, translator, and journalist and the creator of the mock language, Europanto, made up of every European language but without rules or grammar. Marani works as a Policy Officer at the European Union. His New Finnish Grammar, the story of a soldier’s disputed identity, with echoes of The Return of Martin Guerre and The English Patient, ranked top of the Guardian bestseller lists and acquired something of a cult status in the UK. His latest book is The Interpreter.