Esther Kinsky
Autorenfoto zu Esther Kinsky

Esther Kinsky

Esther Kinsky was born in Engelskirchen in 1956. Her oeuvre, which includes poetry, fiction, essays and translations from the Polish, Russian, and English, has been awarded numerous prestigious awars, including Kleist Prize in 2022. Kinsky’s novel Grove won the Preis der Leipziger Buchmesse 2018 and the Düsseldorfer Literaturpreis 2018, was shortlisted for the Europese Literatuurprijs 2021, longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021, and the English translation by Caroline Schmidt was nominated for the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. An unpublished and anonymously entered extract from her novel Rombo was awarded the newly founded W.-G.-Sebald-Literaturpreis in 2020.
Esther Kinsky was born in Engelskirchen in 1956. Her oeuvre, which includes poetry, fiction, essays and translations from the Polish, Russian, and English, has been awarded numerous prestigious awars, including Kleist Prize in 2022. Kinsky’s novel Grove won the Preis der Leipziger Buchmesse 2018 and the Düsseldorfer Literaturpreis 2018, was shortlisted for the Europese Literatuurprijs 2021, longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021, and the English translation by Caroline Schmidt was nominated for the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. An unpublished and anonymously entered extract from her novel Rombo was awarded the newly founded W.-G.-Sebald-Literaturpreis in 2020.
Awards (selection)
Nominated for the Premio Strega Europeo 2023 for Rombo (Italy)
Longlisted for the German Book Prize 2022 for Rombo
Kleist Prize 2022
Longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021 for Grove
W.-G.-Sebald-Literaturpreis 2020
Deutscher Preis für Nature Writing 2020
Christian-Wagner-Preis 2020
Erich Fried Preis 2020
Preis der Leipziger Buchmesse 2018
Internationaler Hermann-Hesse-Preis...
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Nominated for the Premio Strega Europeo 2023 for Rombo (Italy)
Longlisted for the German Book Prize 2022 for Rombo
Kleist Prize 2022
Longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021 for Grove
W.-G.-Sebald-Literaturpreis 2020
Deutscher Preis für Nature Writing 2020
Christian-Wagner-Preis 2020
Erich Fried Preis 2020
Preis der Leipziger Buchmesse 2018
Internationaler Hermann-Hesse-Preis 2018
Düsseldorfer Literaturpreis 2018
Karl-Dedecius-Preis 2011
Paul-Celan-Preis 2009

PUBLICATIONS

Home
Year of Publication: 2025
Esther KinskyYear of Publication: 2025

Images of flight, dispossession, and injury, spanning millennia, in history and myth: Eurydice, frantically fleeing from a god that is stalking her, fails to notice the serpent and dies from its poisonous bite. Landless cottagers in northern Scotland, relocated to less fertile land or forced to emigrate. A young German nobelwoman, educated and gifted, resists the »given«, the »morals of...

Seeing Farther
Year of Publication: 2023
Esther KinskyYear of Publication: 2023

On a journey through the south-east of Hungary, the narrator stops off in an almost completely deserted village on the border to Romania. Resignation and a glorification of the past are the most...

Rights sold to:

USA & Canada (NYRB), UK & Commonwealth (Fitzcarraldo), Spanish world rights (Periférica), Portuguese rights (Elsinore), France (Christian Bourgois), Italy (Iperborea), Netherlands (Pluim), Hungary (Jelenkor)

The Captain and Mimi Catt
Year of Publication: 2022
Esther KinskyYear of Publication: 2022
So cold! And so much snow! Mimi Catt, a snow-white and very clever cat, would prefer nothing more than to stay in her small, cosy basement flat. Even though a nasty mud-brown pug just did his business right in front of Mimi Catt’s window. And on top of it all, a huge ocean liner is stuck in the frozen canal outside the flat! »How is this possible?« Mimi Catt wonders. But once...
Rombo
Year of Publication: 2022
Esther KinskyYear of Publication: 2022
In May and September 1976, two severe earthquakes rip through north-eastern Italy, causing severe damage to the landscape and its population. About a thousand people die under the rubble, tens of...
Rights sold to:

USA & Canada (NYRB), UK & Commonwealth (Fitzcarraldo), Spanish world rights (Periférica), Catalan rights (Angle), Portugal (Elsinore), France (Christian Bourgois), Italy (Iperborea), Netherlands (Pluim), Denmark (Atlanten), Norway (Forlaget Press), Finland (Lurra), Poland (Drzazgi), Turkey (Axis)

Slates
Year of Publication: 2020
Esther KinskyYear of Publication: 2020

Esther Kinsky’s new book is dedicated to slate, the polymorphic, versatile sedimentary rock, and to the Slate Islands, a small archipelago off the West coast of Scotland. For centuries, slate was mined on those islands that are part of the Inner Hebrides and they are lastingly shaped by the intensive industry that was abandoned many decades ago and that has left behind a bizarre landscape of...

Grove
Year of Publication: 2018
Esther KinskyYear of Publication: 2018

Profoundly empathetic, and austere – a minor-key exploration of landscape and land.

Grove is a novel in three parts, each of them concerned with a different...

Rights sold to:

UK & Commonwealth (Fitzcarraldo), USA & Canada (Transit Books), Spanish world rights (Periférica), France (Grasset), Italy (Il Saggiatore), Netherlands (Pluim), Denmark (Atlanten), Finland (Lurra), Greece (Potamos), Ukraine (Knihy XXI)

Why I Am Not Online
Year of Publication: 2016
Serhij ZhadanYear of Publication: 2016

»It’s tough to see history being made.« Since the summer of 2014, Serhiy Zhadan notes down his experiences on his journeys into the eastern Ukrainian war zone. They are poetic...

Rights sold to:

English world rights (selection; Yale UP), Finland (selection; Sammakko), Poland (selection; PIW), Hungary (selection; Jelenkor)


DISCOVER

News
Esther Kinsky talks to Laura de Weck about her fascination with the cinema, about writing in a foreign country and about how we should all start going outside more.
News
The Italian translation of Esther Kinsky's Rombo has been nominated for this year's Premio Strega Europeo.
News
We are thrilled about the Longlist nomination of Story of a Child and Rombo!