Esther Kinsky, born in 1956, is one of the most striking voices in contemporary German literature.

She first gained her reputation as a translator from Russian, Polish and English.

In the last thirteen years, four volumes of poetry and five novels followed, which were awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize (for the novel "Hain", 2018) and the Kleist Prize (for the complete works).

Kinsky's novels do not follow an action-packed plot, but tell reflectively, in a style somewhere between essay and poetic incantation, from the point of view of a woman who settles somewhere abroad without knowing a soul or - for example in the case of the novel "Banatsko", which is set in the Hungarian-Serbian-Romanian border area - to be able to speak the national language at all.

Paul Ingenday

Europe correspondent for the feuilleton in Berlin.

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The foreign and the language, says Esther Kinsky, are basic human beings.

Her books are about these two greats.

And from the landscape: from a fresh look at unknown terrain, from casual encounters, recorded traces, explorations of the terrain, which the narrator examines for memories and stored knowledge.

None of her five novels to date take place in Germany, the country in which she grew up, in whose language she writes and into whose language she translates.

At the same time, she is one of the greatest language creators in German that can be discovered today.

I met Esther Kinsky in Berlin to talk about all of this: strangers, multilingualism and the three steps of seeing-recognizing-naming.

Esther Kinsky's latest novel, "Rombo", was published by Suhrkamp Verlag, has 264 pages and costs 24 euros.

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