Das Blaue vom Himmel
In her novel Das Blaue vom Himmel (2026), Magdalena Schrefel attempted to tell a family story as an environmental story, because no story can be told anymore without the context of the natural environment in which it takes place. She is interested in the question of how literature can make what we abstractly call climate change not only comprehensible, but also tangible. Formally, she wants to continue exploring how a story can contain more than itself—in the sense of Ursula K. Le Guin's Carrier Bag Theory—without giving up what makes a novel a good novel: the characters and their experiences in the plot. And as in most of her texts, it ultimately also addresses the question of what we do when we tell each other stories: if every text is an archive, how can history be organized within it?
Magdalena Schrefel studied European Ethnology at the University of Vienna and Literary Writing at the German Institute for Literature Leipzig after working for several years in Vukovar and Gothenburg. Her radio plays and theater plays have been produced by radio stations and staged at theaters in Austria and Germany, have won several awards and are also available in French and English translation. In the spring of 2022, her collection of stories Brauchbare Menschen was published and was awarded the Robert Walser Prize; her play Die vielen Stimmen meines Bruders, co-written with Valentin Schuster, was awarded a NESTROY 2024. She lives in Berlin.
»Susan Sontag sagt, dass es die Metaphern sind, die Krankheiten so interessant machen. Metaphern sind Bilder, die helfen können. Aber ist Krieg das richtige Bild für das, was mir widerfährt?«