Book Launch & Discussion - Worlds Apart by Julia Franck

The event features Julia Franck in conversation with her translator Imogen Taylor, whose sensitive rendering brings Franck’s story to English readers. The discussion will be moderated by Katja Hoyer, German-British historian, journalist and author of Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990.

WORLDS APART (original title: Welten Auseinander)tells the story of Julia, born in East Berlin and just eight when her actress mother uproots their fractured family — four daughters by different fathers— and heads West in search of a better life. Their eventual landing in the remote countryside of Schleswig-Holstein solves no problems for this disrupted household.

Desperate to escape a childhood of rural poverty, neglect and shame, the lonely child becomes addicted to writing. Aged 13, she leaves her family. At school in West Berlin, she finally encounters love. In this autofictional novel based on her youthful diaries and early life, Julia Franck shows why and how a great writer found her voice.

JULIA FRANCK - Born in Communist East Berlin in 1970, Julia Franck is an author and essayist who has published novels and short stories. The daughter of an actress and granddaughter of a sculptor, her powerful novels of family and motherhood draw on her own life across divided Germany as they delve into the nation’s tumultuous past.
Two of her novels have been filmed; Die Mittagsfrau (The Blind Side of the Heart), which won the German Book Prize in 2007, sold over a million copies worldwide, and has been translated into over 40 languages.
The recipient of numerous awards, she lives in Berlin.

KATJA HOYER is a German-British historian and journalist. She is a Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her last book Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990 was a Sunday Times and Spiegel bestseller and long-listed for the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize.
Katja is a columnist for Berliner Zeitung and a regular contributor to British and American news outlets such as the BBC, Bloomberg, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian. Her new book Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe will be published in May 2026.

IMOGEN TAYLOR - Born in London, Imogen Taylor studied Modern Languages at Oxford and completed her MA and PhD at Humboldt University in Berlin.
She has been living in Berlin since 2001 and working as a literary translator since 2014. Her many translations include work by Alfred Döblin, Franziska Gänsler, Dana Grigorcea and Judith Schalansky.
She was the winner of the Austrian Cultural Forum Translation Prize 2024 and runner-up in the 2024 Schlegel Tieck Prize for her translation of Sasha Salzmann’s Glorious People.
She is currently translating Peter Kurzeck.

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