Posted: 23 February 2006
Guest Lecture - Gabrielle Alioth
“Getting the story out of history – historical sources as inspiration and diversion”: Public lecture by Gabrielle Alioth, writer in residence with the German Section in the UCD School of Languages, Literatures and Film. Lecture to be held on Wednesday 1 March, at 6.30pm, in the William Jefferson Clinton Auditorium, UCD Belfield, D4.
Her lecture will focus on the eighteenth-century Austrian artist Angelica Kauffmann (protegée of Joshua Reynolds and friend of Goethe), who is the subject of the novel she is currently writing.
Gabrielle Alioth’s residency at UCD is financed by the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Cultural Affairs in Bern and supported by the Swiss Embassy in Dublin.
About Frau Alioth
Gabrielle Alioth was born in Basel in 1955. She studied economics and history of art and worked for many years as an economist, before moving to Ireland with her husband in 1984. She first worked here as a freelance translator, writing also for radio, and as a journalist for German-language newspapers. Since 1990 she has published several novels, the most recent one being Die Erfindung von Liebe und Tod (The Invention of Love and Death), 2003, which has received critical acclaim. She is currently writing a novel about the eighteenth-century artist Angelica Kauffmann, protégée of Joshua Reynolds and friend of Goethe. Gabrielle Alioth’s works are published by Nagel & Kimche in Zürich. Her website can be found at www.gabriellealioth.com.
The German Section, School of Languages, Literatures and Film, UCD, is very privileged to have Gabrielle Alioth as writer in residence with them this year. Her residency is being financed by a generous grant from the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Cultural Affairs in Bern (Kompetenzzentrum für Kulturaußenpolitik, Bern), and is supported by the Swiss Embassy in Dublin.
Students from all years are profiting from Gabrielle Alioth’s residency. First-year students of German enjoyed reading two of her short stories as part of the module “Exploring the Text” in the first semester, where Gabrielle Alioth took part in the lecture programme and in a lively discussion forum. To date she has offered three writing workshops to undergraduate students of German (also open to Erasmus students from Germany) where the students discussed the theme of “Verwandlung” (Metamorphosis), through which they were encouraged to explore the process of writing as transformation and to produce their own texts in German and English. On 8 December 2005, Gabrielle Alioth gave a public reading from her latest novel, Die Erfindung von Liebe und Tod, at the Goethe Institute in Dublin. This novel is one of the texts on the final-year seminar “Images of Switzerland in contemporary Swiss-German literature”, and Gabrielle Alioth will be taking part in the sessions devoted to this novel at the end of the semester. She is also contributing to the second-year seminar on the detective novels of the Swiss writer, Friedrich Dürrenmatt. The student Deutsch Soc (German Society) recently organised a workshop with Gabrielle Alioth, where she introduced them to pop songs in Swiss-German dialects.