Ulrike Draesner & this Symposium

Author Ulrike Draesner (b. in 1962) is currently a Visiting Fellow at New College, and resident in Oxford for the academic year 2015-16.

Draesner is a multi-award-winning poet, a writer of novels and short stories, an essayist and a translator of French and Anglo-American poetry. Her collaborative multimedia work includes librettos, radio soundscapes and poetic installations. While in Oxford she is working on a creative experiment exploring bilingualism and border-crossing.

By turns playful and poetic, erudite and explicit, Draesner's fiction combines intellectual discourses with thoughtful plots, always with an awareness of language(s). Her poetry is experimental, visceral and visual, yet rooted in the real.

This symposium, the first dedicated to Draesner's work, brings together international experts on contemporary prose and poetry along with the author herself to discuss themes ranging from history to the nature of being human. A bilingual performance of new work, open to the public, Draeser's introduction to her current projects and a translation masterclass aim to bring Draesner's multi-faceted oeuvre to a wider audience.