Literature & Music: Der Himmel bis zur Erde

Beatrice Simonsen & Henrik Sande 2022

Beatrice Simonsen reads from “Der Himmel bis zur Erde”.  Stories, edition lex liszt 12, Oberwart – April 2022. Book table. Book signing.

Musical interventions: Henrik Sande (piano)

Images of a world in motion inspire Beatrice Simonsen’s atmospherically dense stories in Der Himmel bis zur Erde. Alternating between authorial and first-person narrator, the author reflects tangibly, critically or poetically on “the world” as man shapes it. Again and again she seeks the wide view, as growing up on the Iron Curtain taught her to set out “from the edge of the world” – to the line of the horizon where heaven and earth meet. With both feet on the ground and her head in the clouds, Beatrice Simonsen adopts different positions of a female perspective. The resulting realistic to fantastically coloured “voices” attempt to capture moments of the precious wonders of life.

“People marvelled at the beautiful image of fluttering birds in the cloudless blue. People quickly rummaged for their sunglasses so as not to miss the destination of their flight behind the arc of flickering spectral colours. But how were they to understand the miracle?” (from: Land of Promise)

Beatrice Simonsen lives as an author, literary critic and cultural mediator in Vienna and Burgenland. Edited two volumes “Grenzräume”: on South Tyrol (Edition Raetia, 2005) and Burgenland (edition lex liszt 12, 2015), as well as “Der Literatur Raum im Bildhauerhaus in St. Margarethen im Burgenland” (Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2019). Literary publications in anthologies, magazines and on the radio. Conceives and organises synergetic events at special locations under the independent brand “Kunst und Literatur” (www.kunstundliteratur.at) since 2013. Member of the Graz Authors’ Assembly (GAV) and the Podium literary circle.