Professor Karen Leeder's translation longlisted for Dublin Literature Award

Professor Karen Leeder's translation of Ulrike Almut Sandig's Monsters Like Us has been longlisted for the Dublin Literature Award.

Monsters Like Us is the story of old friends Ruth and Viktor in the last days of Communist East Germany. They are inseparable since kindergarten, but are forced to go their different ways to escape their difficult childhood: Ruth into music and the life of a professional musician; Viktor into violence and a neo-Nazi gang. Monsters Like Us is a story of families, a story of abuse, a story about the search for redemption and the ways it takes shape over generations. More than anything, it is about the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and who we want to be.

"Sandig’s lyric prose, captured brilliantly by translator Karen Leeder who has translated two volumes of her poetry, is tight and spare, directed into carefully crafted scenes that often end on an open note. This vital book is one of the most intense and moving works I have encountered in a long time." (Joseph Schreiber.)

Find out more in these reviews

‘Monsters Like us: Helen Nurse in conversation with Karen Leeder’, for New Books in German, June 2022: https://www.new-books-in-german.com/monsters-like-us/ 

Trafika Europe Radio, broadcast live 6 November 2022: https://www.trafikaeurope.org/podcast/women-in-translation/?c=04007ae3e449&fbclid=IwAR0Ce2Loh8KcypLhO3bpFoLg0XdnG44ZarqCnqooGIBGzP_oCBU3kDi-P8E; https://omny.fm/shows/trafika-europe-radio/ulrike-almut-sandig-karen-leeder-monsters-like-us 

Karen was the principal investigator for the Humanities Cultural Programme project Landschaft