Swiss author Dorothee Elmiger talks about Out of the Sugar Factory, translated by Megan Ewing, with Jessi Jezewska Stevens, author of The Exhibition of Persephone Q and The Visitors.
This event is co-presented by the Center for the Art of Translation, the Embassy of Switzerland of the United States of America, and the Goethe-Institut Washington.
Purchase your copy of the book here.
About Out of the Sugar Factory:
Elmiger’s breakout novel is a staring contest with History: an effort to map the resonances and frictions introduced to the world by the sugar industry. But can any writing project contain such devastation?
The narrator of Out of the Sugar Factory, Dorothee Elmiger, is a writer and archivist—and possibly a hoarder—of objects and stories that speak to the profound impact of the sugar industry on the world. Seated in the room where her vast collection sprawls across the floor, she obsessively connects a violent global industry to our unsettled present and her own desires. Elmiger’s deeply researched and innovative novel brings together subjects as varied as the institutionalization of Ellen West, the Haitian Revolution, Chantal Akerman, and Karl Marx to uncover the vast network of entrenched relationships lurking just below the surface. Out of the Sugar Factory, in Megan Ewing’s matchless translation from German, is a prismatic account of a writer’s overwhelming need to tell a story that is true, to follow the sugar wherever it may lead.
***
Dorothee Elmiger was born in 1985 in Switzerland. She is the author of Out of the Sugar Factory, Shift Sleepers and Invitation to the Bold of Heart. Elmiger has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Aspekte Literature Prize for the best debut novel written in German, the 2021 Schillerpreis, and most recently the 2022 Nicolas Born Prize. Out of the Sugar Factory was shortlisted for both the German and the Swiss Book Award. Elmiger is an editor at Volte Books. She lives in New York City.
Jessi Jezewska Stevens is the author of The Visitors and The Exhibition of Persephone Q. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Paris Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in Mathematics from Middlebury College and an MFA from Columbia University. She lives in New York and Geneva.
***
Accessibility note: This event is up two flights of stairs and Lost City Books does not have an elevator.