Tamangur, Leta Semadeni
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.’
