While You Were Sleeping

Or, perhaps, while I was not blogging here, I was blogging elsewhere.

Since I last posted, I've had some interesting and difficult times, and some of the more interesting (and least difficult) involved trips to Germany. Rangatira has been published in German, and I've been over there four times this northern summer - Frankfurt, Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne. This week TMiddy and I head off to Frankfurt for the Book Fair and then, after a quick return to Glasgow so I can teach some classes, we fly to Switzerland for the Zofingen Festival. Unbelievably, because of the busy-ness of my schedule, I had to say no to readings in Zurich and Vienna. I've never been to Vienna, and desperately want to go - not just to eat Sachertorte, though obviously that's the chief draw - but the timing just didn't work out.

So it's off to Frankfurt now, and to a complicated schedule and (no doubt) to an overwhelming experience at the Book Fair. The theme of the NZ Guest of Honour programme at Frankfurt this year is While You Were Sleeping - coincidentally the title of my favourite Sandra Bullock movie - but I doubt we'll be getting much sleep there, especially if all all sixty New Zealand authors are staying at the same hotel. Will Fergus Barrowman lure us into evil-doing involving late nights at the hotel bar? Will I forget to change the time on my phone so I'm an hour late to every interview, as I was in Berlin? Most important of all, will there be time to go shopping at Kaufhof?

I've promised TMiddy that I'm going to write a Frankfurt diary for this blog, after the official opening of the New Zealand Pavilion, when I write my final blog post for the FBF site. That's where I've been posting for the past few months. The first was about how New Zealand is not Venezuela; the next was about the New Zealand Post Book Awards. Later in August I wrote about Maori novelists, and in September about taking part in the Long Night of Maori Stories at the Berlin Festival. My most recent post was about my reading in Cologne with Sarah Quigley.

Despite my recent travails - anxiety, depression - I'm looking forward to Frankfurt very much. As well as various readings and discussions, I'll be taking part - for or the first and possibly only time in my life - in the same interview series as a Nobel winner, Herta Mueller. Not at the same time, you understand, but still: we'll sit on the same blue sofa ...

 

 

 

Comments

[DMay]

It is SO ANNOYING that European phone networks don't automatically change the time on your phone as you cross time zones. I went a full weekend in Amsterdam without ever noticing the time on my phone was an hour off, and missed my flight out. Happy to hear you are busy!