Every year, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize ceremony traditionally concludes with a literary reading. This year Goethe Institut was pleased to welcome author and publisher Daniela Seel, who was introduced by editor and renowned critic for the “Deutschlandfunk”, Denis Scheck.

Daniela Seel was born in Frankfurt/Main in 1974 and now resides in Berlin, where she works as an author, publisher, and journalist. In 2003 she founded the publishing house KOOKbooks, intended as a “laboratory for poetry as a way of life”. To date, her literary texts have been published in periodicals, anthologies, and can be heard on radio broadcasts. Her first, full poetry volume will be released in 2009. She has been honored both the Kurt Wolff Stiftung sponsorship award (2006), and the Horst Beinek prize from the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (2007). In 2006, Daniela was listed as one of the “100 Masterminds of Tomorrow” by Germany’s Land of Ideas initiative.

Denis Scheck studied German languages and literatures, contemporary history, and political science in Tübingen, Düsseldorf and at the University of Texas at Dallas’ Center for Translation Studies. He has been a visiting professor of literary criticism at the Göttingen University since the beginning of 2004. Denis works as a literary agent, translator of American and British authors, publisher, and freelance critic, and has been the literature editor for the Deutschlandfunk (German Broadcasting Service) since 1997. He also moderates Druckfrisch, a monthly book program, for German television network, ARD.

Recorded Tuesday, June 10, 2008 at Goethe-Institut Chicago.