Landleben, eine Idylle?

Lorena Simmel (Berlin)

The debut novel Ferymont is the literary portrait of a region in the heart of Europe that addresses a barely noticed reality in agriculture. When she runs out of money the narrator from Berlin returns to her home village of Ferymont in Switzerland and works there for a season as a worker in fruit orchards and tobacco fields. She befriends a woman from Moldova and gets to know the living conditions of people who travel between impoverished Eastern and wealthy Western Europe. The novel questions capitalist working conditions in industrial agriculture.

Alina Herbing (Berlin)

Alina Herbing focuses on growing up on an East German farm during the 1990s where the boundaries between the generations and between nature and civilization increasingly dissolve. Her parents freely chose the dream of an idyllic rural life as a way out and as an ideal of an anti-capitalist lifestyle, but this becomes a nightmare for their daughters. First the father went, then the brothers, now numerous animals populate the house, while the mother gives them all her attention. How should the narrator find the way to a self-determined future?

In cooperation with the literature podcast Auf Buchfühlung and Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council Foundation.

***BIOGRAPHS***

Lorena Simmel
b. 1988, is a Swiss author. She has published poetry, novels and essays. Her debut novel Ferymont (2024) has been awarded the Robert Walser Prize.

“Ferymont” is a quiet novel which sensitively faces a reality that hardly seems to play a role in Western Europe. Lorena Simmel gives the people in her novel a voice; she illustrates what goes wrong and highlights what each of us should think about during our next shopping trip.
Jana Bohlmann / SR2

Alina Herbing
b. 1984, is a German author. Her debut novel No One’s with the Calves was published in 2017 and became one of the talking points of that year. In 2022, Sabrina Sarabi produced the drama film based on the novel. Recently published: Animals That You Have To Be Afraid Of, 2024.

The authenticity, with which Herbing tells of the post-unification generation, the natural racism, alcoholism, the men clinging onto traditional gender roles and the resounding lack of prospects, was based on everyday experience.
Gunda Bartels, Tagesspiegel