Seagull Books, May 2025

The Romansh poet Leta Semadeni’s first novel, Tamangur, is a gem with many facets. This childhood idyll in a remote alpine valley full of shadows throbs with a dark undercurrent of loss. Tamangur is an old stone pine forest in the Engadin but in this book it is also a mysterious realm of the dead, a kind of Valhalla for hunters and their families.
Tamangur unfolds in vignettes. Eighty-four overlapping and intersecting episodes and flashbacks follow an unnamed young girl, simply called ‘the child’, and her grandmother as they navigate their grief at the loss of the girl’s beloved grandfather and her younger brother. It gradually becomes clear that the child believes she is responsible for her brother’s death, as a result of which her parents have abandoned her with her grandmother.
The small village has its share of oddballs and cranks, more or less harmless, including Elsa, whose passionate affair with Elvis is somewhat complicated by his absence, a seamstress who steals the memories of others, a louring chimney sweep, and a rude goat. They form a makeshift family of misfits that take some edge off the sharper corners of fate. Semadeni’s prose is crystalline, evocative and highly attuned to the faintly absurd.

PRAISE FOR TAMANGUR:

‘In her debut novel, the poet Leta Semadeni has fashioned a roundelay of intense moments, interwoven with dreams, desires and reality. … an enchanting book.’ Brigitte

‘A audacious counterpart of any idyllic portrayal of the Engadin.’
NZZ am Sonntag

‘Again and again, tragedy seeps through the cracks of the idyll, the colors of which shine all the more intensely against the black backdrop. For Leta Semadeni is first and foremost a (prizewinning) poet. Her slender debut novel reads like a poem, in which not a single mundane word is used arbitrarily. [The prose] is plain and accessible and yet ravishingly artful.” Berner Zeitung

‘Elemental, powerful, serious, honest—at the same time and especially: highly poetic.’ Buchkultur

‘Tamangur – a sublime book about life and love.’
Monique Schwitter, Bayerischer Rundfunk

Leta Semadeni was born in Scuol, Engadin in 1944. She studied languages at the University of Zürich. She worked as a teacher in Zürich and in Engadin. She has held residencies in Latin America, Paris, Zug, Berlin, and New York. Since 2005, she has lived and worked as a freelance writer in Lavin.
Semadeni writes poetry in Romansch and in German, and translates her poems between these two languages. Her poetry collections have won several awards, including the 2011 Literature Prize of the Canton Graubünden and the Swiss Schiller Foundation Prize.
For her first novel, Tamangur, which has been translated into over a half dozen languages, she was awarded the 2016 Swiss Literature Prize. This was followed in 2017 by the Graubünden Cultural Award for her life’s work and in 2023 by Switzerland’s most prestigious literary award, the Grand Prix for Literature. The jury noted: ‘Leta Semadeni’s work is one of rugged beauty that we rub up against just as the protagonists of her novels rub up against the often painful world.’

Seagull Books
Amazon

New Directions, April 2025

A powerful historical work about war and its victims, never before in English, from the celebrated author of Malina

Written when Ingeborg Bachmann was only eighteen, The Honditsch Cross, her second-longest completed work of prose, is a historical novella set during the final days of the Napoleonic occupation of Austria in 1813.

A young theology student, returning from Vienna to his family home in Carinthia, finds the invading troops stationed there, led by a despotic officer, who has been exploiting and terrorizing his family and friends. He is immediately thrown into the center of the conflict, torn between defending his homeland, the pull of physical desire, and the pursuit of his theological studies…

In this gripping work, Bachmann begins to explore themes that will preoccupy her for the rest of her writing career: complex notions of nationality and patriotism, the roles and rights of women in patriarchal societies, the meaningless destruction of war and its aftermath, and the bitter moments of disillusionment that lead to intellectual maturity.

New Directions
Amazon

Seagull Books, 2026

Laura Freudenthaler’s timely literary novel is rooted in the present-day climate crisis. Arson chronicles the nightmarish scenarios in the daily life of an unnamed narrator as the climate crisis ravages her life, relationships, sleep, and ability to relate to the people around her.

More about Arson at New Books in German and Jung und Jung.

Laura Freudenthaler was born in Salzburg in 1984 and lives in Vienna. Her debut novel Der Schädel von Madeleine was published in 2014. She has received numerous prizes for her work and was awarded the European Union literary prize for her second novel Geistergeschichte (2019). Her work has been translated into multiple languages, including but not limited to Italian, Dutch, Danish, Swedish and Polish.

Website: http://laurafreudenthaler.eu/

Seagull Books, 2025

A great novel about origins and identity, about a merciless century in which the world was split between friend and foe.

In 1942, a Norwegian woman travels to Vorarlberg, Austria. She is pregnant and planning on starting a new life here with her fiancé, a Wehrmacht soldier. But for her and her son, Heinz, everything turns out differently – worse.

The only things Heinz Fritz knows for sure about his mother are the stages of her first long journey: Oslo – Copenhagen – Berlin – Munich – Hohenems. It’s detailed in a document he carries with him his entire life: a document from the SS Lebensborn association. The Norwegian woman has taken up with the enemy. And put her trust in the wrong man. For when she arrives in Austria, instead of welcoming her, her fiancé’s family turns her away. And she can’t go back to Norway , because there she's now considered a collaborator…

By interrogating himself thoroughly and uncompromisingly, the novel’s narrator – the woman’s son – tries to solve the mysteries of his origins, to uncover the truth about his parents. A search for clues, at whose end everything changes yet again, revealing a second, “brighter” version of the dark story.

More at New Books in German and KiWi

Alois Hotschnig, born in 1959, is a freelance author. He has won numerous prizes for his works including the Province of Carinthia award at the Ingeborg Bachmann competition in Klagenfurt, the Anna Seghers prize, the Italo Svevo prize for his complete works and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. His works have been translated into several languages.

Selection: Leonardo’s Hands (1992); Ludwig’s Room (2014); Maybe This Time (2011)

Seagull Books, 2026

Judith Keller brings her usual brand of refreshing, comic absurdity to her novel Wilde Manöver, awarded the 2024 Swiss Literature Prize. The central narrative recounts a day in the lives of Vera and Peli, two women who, in a burst of self-empowerment, create works of performance art from stolen lawn ornaments and furniture. They were ostensibly directed by local construction cranes and may or may not have been involved in the drug trade. Their adventure is framed both by a police interview conducted shortly after Vera’s apprehension on charges of auto theft, drug-smuggling, and vandalism in the summer of 2025 and by a report of historical research into that interrogation conducted seven decades later in 2098.
            During the police interview, Vera gives confusing, fantastical answers to the inspector before disappearing from the station during a power cut. Three years after the interrogation, elements of Vera’s implausible account seem to have been coming true. Seven decades later, the signs and symbols that Vera and Peli scattered throughout Zurich on their spree in 2025 appear to be keys to explaining the state of the world in 2098.
In her recent story collection, The Questionable Ones, Judith Keller reveals the extraordinary lurking inside the ordinary and the ordinary at the core of the extraordinary. In this novel, she ups the ante on unreliable narrators and keeps readers constantly alert to multiple alternative explanations and plausible implausibilities.

"I have rarely read anything this refreshing, bold and funny." Saša Stanišić 

More at New Books in German

Judith Keller was born in Switzerland in 1985, studied creative writing in Leipzig and Biel, and qualified as a German language teacher in Berlin and Bogotá. She has also been an editor at the literary journal Edit. She won honorary awards from the city and canton of Zurich for her story collection The Questionable Ones, translated by Tess Lewis (Seagull Books 2023).