Ursula Ackrill

Ursula Ackrill (born 1974 in Brașov, Socialist Republic of Romania) is a Romanian German-language writer. With her debut novel Zeiden, im Januar, she was shortlisted for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2015.

Life

Ursula Ackrill is of Transylvanian Saxon descent on her father's side, while her mother is Romanian.[1] Her physics teacher was Klaus Johannis, from Sibiu, who became Romania’s president in 2014.[2] Ackrill studied German studies and Orthodox theology in Bucharest, while her family had already emigrated to Germany.[3] In 2003, she received her PhD on the writer Christa Wolf at the University of Leicester. In 2005, she obtained a Master’s degree in Information management. She is married, lives in Nottingham, and works as a librarian.[4]

Literary career

With her novel Zeiden, im Januar, which she submitted unsolicited to Klaus Wagenbach Verlag and which was accepted, she made it onto the shortlist of the Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2015.

In her book, Ackrill describes – using the example of the small town of Zeiden in the January days of 1941 – the largely unprocessed events in Transylvania during the Third Reich, when many Transylvanian Germans aligned themselves with Hitler’s Germany. She also expands her view to the situation of the German minority in relation to the Romanian state and its slogan “Romania for the Romanians”.[5] The fate of the Jews is also central in her novel. Some of her characters are based on historical figures, such as the concentration camp doctor Fritz Klein and aviation pioneer Albert Ziegler.

Reception

Critics received the complexly structured and linguistically unusual novel Zeiden, im Januar, which, similar to the literature of Herta Müller from the Banat, uses older forms of language while being very precise in detail, largely positively.[6][7][8]

Ernest Wichner wrote that the author had developed a "tone and a use of language that transforms the linguistic otherness of that region into an artistic language. Grammatical and syntactic peculiarities of that colloquial German give the text a specific coloration, a kind of sepia sound that lends the narrated episodes historical authenticity despite their fictional character".[2]

By contrast, Knut Cordsen criticized Ackrill’s style as an overly heavy web of metaphors; he wrote that she uses “a strangely twisted language that causes the reader to stumble on almost every page”.[9]

Works

References

  1. ^ "Ursula Ackrill in conversation with Julia Benkert on 23 March 2015". Bayerischer Rundfunk. 2015-03-19. Archived from the original on 2016-06-03. Retrieved 2021-05-20.
  2. ^ a b Ernest Wichner: Stechen und Draufgehen in Die Zeit, issue 5, 2015. (online here)
  3. ^ Ursula Ackrill, writer on “Bayern 2”, 25 February 2015 at the Wayback Machine (archived 2015-03-07)
  4. ^ "Ursula Ackrill and her unexpected novel debut". volksstimme.de. Retrieved 2021-11-06.
  5. ^ Zeiden, im Januar, Berlin 2015, p. 38
  6. ^ Christian Thomas: Das versiegelte Wissen, in: Frankfurter Rundschau, 17 February 2015
  7. ^ Jurek Skrobala: Heimat, Chaos, Schulmädchenfantasien – vom Überlebensgroßen im Kleinen, in: Kultur Spiegel, March 2015, p. 14
  8. ^ Lothar Müller: Der Schatten des Fliegers, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 4 March 2015, p. 12
  9. ^ Knut Cordsen in the book magazine Diwan, Bayern 2 on 7 March 2015
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