Double Reading with Lilli Tollkien and Tomer Gardi

Description

Double reading with Lilli Tollkien and Tomer Gardi Lilli Tollkien: Supporting the Sky with Both Hands Moderation: Markus Iseli Lale grew up in the 80s in a Berlin men's commune, amidst parties and revolutionary plans. She is allowed to stay awake as long as she wants, eat sweets, watch TV forever – yet she longs for security, while her boundaries are repeatedly crossed. On the narrow line between freedom and neglect, she finds her way, stumbles at the edges, and years later finds stability in storytelling itself. Supporting the sky with both hands is a novel full of authenticity, vulnerability, and poetic tension. Lilli Tollkien, born in 1980, began various training programs and studied directing and music therapy in Berlin and Heidelberg. She has worked in very different professions, such as a addiction counselor in a juvenile detention center, a job coach, and a costume designer. Besides her current profession, she takes photographs and has published in anthologies. Supporting the sky with both hands is her first novel. Tomer Gardi: Deliver Moderation: Leonora Schulthess They are everywhere, we see them every day. Whether in Delhi, Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, or Berlin, they buzz through the cities: food delivery people. Tomer Gardi connects their stories into a global contemporary epic about racism, exploitation, love, and the longing for connection. Filmon, who fled Eritrea to Tel Aviv, works as a delivery person without a work permit, under a false name – he wants to earn enough money to bring his wife and daughter to Berlin. The two learn German with Nina, who travels to Delhi for an exchange semester and falls in love with the Argentine Ramón. The narrator travels to Istanbul to spend a stolen literary prize money, while in Buenos Aires, Ramón's mother struggles with his absence. Deliver is a literary world tour in six episodes: profound and humorous, with political sensitivity and literary verve. The Mimesis part was created in collaboration with Anne Birkenhauer, who translated it from Hebrew. Tomer Gardi, born in 1974, lives as a writer in Berlin. His debut Stein, Papier was published in 2011 in Hebrew and in 2013 in German translation. In 2016, his novel Broken German was published. For the novel A Round Thing, he received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2022. For Deliver, Tomer Gardi researched on-site in six cities over three years. The reading is part of the Literary Autumn Gstaad Festival: www.literarischerherbst.ch