Helga M. Novak

Helga M. Novak (pseudonym for Mary Karlsdottir; born September 8, 1935 in Berlin -Köpenick, † 24 December 2013 Ruedersdorf in Berlin) was a German - Icelandic writer.

Life and work

Helga M. Novak grew up with adoptive parents. She went against the wishes of parents in the FDJ and attended a government boarding school near Berlin. There they laid in 1954 from her high school. She then studied until 1957 Journalism and Philosophy at the University of Leipzig. She held various jobs as a Monte urine, lab technician and bookseller. In 1961 she went to Iceland, where she married an Icelander. From this later divorced two children were born. Novak worked temporarily at a fish factory and in a carpet weaving, but did next to also travel to France, Spain and the USA. In 1965 she returned to the GDR. She studied at the Literary Institute " Johannes R. Becher " in Leipzig. 1966, she was stripped of his GDR citizenship for distributing themselves mimeographed, dissident texts. She held her first then back to Iceland and took part in the first 1966 meeting of the Group 47 in Princeton; In 1967 she went to the Federal Republic of Germany. Since then, she lived for a time in Berlin, Yugoslavia and Frankfurt am Main. She was Icelandic citizen.

She began as a writer of politically embossed poetry, in which the massive intervention of the East German state be denounced to private life; later came the transition to realistic nature poetry. Her prose is initially documentary nature; meaning her two autobiographical novels The Ice Saints and Bird are featherless. Novak has also written a large number of radio plays. Despite their extensive, mostly positive by critics rated the work they took within the contemporary German literature an outsider position.

Helga M. Novak belonged since 1972 to the Association of German writer and since 1971 the PEN center of Germany. In 1992 she publicly came to their previous activity as an unofficial assistant for the Ministry of State Security. From 1987 she lived in Legbąd, powiat Tucholsky ( Tuchel ) / Poland and since the mid- 2000s in Erkner near Berlin.

Awards

Works

  • Ballad of traveling Anna. Neuwied and Others 1965
  • Colloquium with four skins. Neuwied and Others 1967
  • The freezing house. The environment. Hamburg 1968 ( along with Timm Bartholl )
  • Social Gathering. Neuwied and Others 1968
  • Resident in the West End. Neuwied and Others 1970 ( together with Horst Karasek )
  • Stay in a mad house. Neuwied and Others 1971
  • Strangely report from an ancient city. Hannover 1973 ( together with Dorothea Nosbisch )
  • The Ballad of the castrated doll. Leverkusen 1975 ( together with Peter Kaczmarek )
  • Ballads from the short process. Berlin 1975
  • The land acquisition of Torre Bela. Berlin 1976
  • Margaret with the cabinet. Berlin 1978
  • The Ice Saints. Darmstadt et al 1979
  • Palisades. Darmstadt et al 1980
  • Featherless bird. Darmstadt et al 1982
  • Green heather green heather. Darmstadt et al 1983
  • Legend Transsib. Darmstadt et al 1985
  • Märkische Feemorgana. Frankfurt 1989
  • Stay in a mad house. Schöffling & Co., Frankfurt am Main 1995
  • Silvatica. Poems. Schöffling & Co., Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-89561-112-3
  • As long as love letters arrive. Collected Poems, ed. Rita Jorek, with an afterword by Eva Demski, Frankfurt am Main 1999; expanded new edition in two volumes Schöffling & Co., Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-89561-116-2
  • Where I am now. Poems selected by Michael Lentz, Schöffling & Co., Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-89561-115-5
  • Love Poems, ed. and with an afterword by Silke Scheuermann, Schöffling & Co., Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-89561-118-6
  • Living Fund. A story. Publisher Ulrich Keicher, Warmbronn 2010, ISBN 978-3-938743-92-8
  • In the gooseneck. Schöffling & Co., Frankfurt am Main, 2013, ISBN 978-3-89561-119-3

Media

  • Very Tale of Bible Babel or: page jumps in the study of Mao Bible ( German Grammophon / Luchterhand 2574 001)
  • While still arrive love letters, spoken by Doris Wolters ( Gugis Audio Books & Books 939 461 3 15 6 )

Editorship

  • One day the talking doll has not let off. Texts to emancipation to maturity. Bertelsmann, München / Gütersloh / Vienna 1972 ( with Horst Karasek )
December 24 German Institute for Literature Princeton (New Jersey) Autobiography Tuchola County Gerrit-Engelke-Preis Ida-Dehmel-Literaturpreis Christian-Wagner-Preis Droste-Preis Meersburg Die Horen (Morawietz) Perlentaucher Integrated Authority File
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