An Inventory of Losses


The Talk will be conducted in German with simultaneous interpretation into English.
The Goethe Institut and HKILF present another strange and wondrous attempt by the German writer/book designer Judith Schalansky to evoke the unknown. Each chapter in An Inventory of Losses follows the convention of a different genre and reveals insights from the fragmentary remains of unique things and places that have lost to time – the paradisal island of Tuanaki, the Caspian Tiger, Sappho’s love poems, Greta Garbo’s fading beauty, a painting by Caspar David Friedrich or the former East Germany’s Palace of the Republic. To be moderated by Julia Kuehn, a Professor of English Literature at the University of Hong Kong, the conversation will focus on Judith Schalansky’s inventive approach to the recurring topics of loss and disappearance, remembrance and forgetting.
This event is supported by the Goethe-Institut Hong Kong.
Authors will appear virtually.
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Featuring (click on author names to read more)
Judith Schalansky, born in Greifswald in 1980, lives in Berlin and works as a writer, book designer, and editor of a prestigious natural history list. Her books, including the international bestseller Atlas of Remote Islands and the novel The Giraffe’s Neck, have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Julia Kuehn is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Hong Kong.