News

“das blaue sofa”, a must-see programme at the Frankfurt and Leipzig book fairs, has been maintained despite the cancellation of the Leipzig book fair, which was scheduled to take place from 17 to 20 March.

“Many authors welcome the opportunity to present their current books to a wide audience in this way,” says Karin Schlautmann, Bertelsmann’s Director of Corporate Communications.

45 authors will take their seats on the famous blue sofa to present their new novels. Among them, we will note the presence of the Luxembourgish Guy Helminger for his new novel Lärm, published by Capybarabooks on Thursday 17 March from 5.20 to 5.40 pm as well as Julia Holbe for her novel Boy meets girl published by Penguin on Friday 18 March from 3.40 to 4 pm.

The programme will be broadcast on livrestream, but also on ZDF, Deutschlandfunk Kultur and 3sat.

About Guy Helminger
Guy Helminger was born in Esch/Alzette (Luxembourg) in 1963 and has been a writer in Cologne since 1985. He writes poems, novels, radio plays, theatre, screenplays and acts as a presenter at literary events.
In 2002 he received the youth theater sponsorship award from the state of Baden-Württemberg, and in the same year the Prix Servais for »Rost«. In 2004 he was awarded the 3sat prize at the 28th Days of German-language Literature in Klagenfurt. In 2006, the city of his birth awarded him the Prix du mérite culturel de la ville d’Esch. In 2016 he was awarded the Dresden Poetry Prize and just recently the Gustav-Regler-Prize 2020.

The capybarabooks publishing house has so far published the collection of plays Venezuela (2015) and the play Jockey (2019), the new editions of the collection of short stories Rost (2016) and the novel Neubrasilien (2020), the children’s book Eng Taass fir d’Nefertiti Nilpäerd (drawings by Manuela Olten, 2015), the travel reports The Avenue of Teeth. Notes and photos from Iran (2018) and The clay buildings of light. Notes and Photos from Yemen (2019) published. Guy Helminger’s lastest novel The Lombardi Affair has been published in November 2020. His most recent novel is Lärm.

About Julia Holbe
Julia Holbe, born in 1969, is from Luxembourg. She lives between Frankfurt am Main and Brittany. For twenty years she worked as a reader of international literature for the publishing house S. Fischer. Fischer publishing house. Her first novel, Unsere glücklichen Tage, reached the top 20 of the SPIEGEL bestseller list.