The series offers lively, comprehensive accounts of contemporary German culture written by experts and designed for advanced student readers and scholars alike. Both in monographs and closely-defined edited collections, it aims to introduce major authors, thinkers, filmmakers, literary topics, genres and landmark individual works, focusing on the period since 1989 but reaching back, where appropriate, to the vital hinterland of the 1970s.

Ulrike Draesner is a prize-winning writer of novels, short stories, critical essays and poetry, and one of the foremost authors in Germany today. While a number of volumes have been published in German on her work, the current Companion offers the first volume on Draesner in English, capitalising on the interest in her work in Germany and further afield.

Introducing Draesner’s major novels and short stories, poetry collections and essays, as well as giving an overview of existing research focusing on migration, memory, science, gender and bodily experience, chapters by international scholars in this volume also break new ground by focussing on visual culture, poetology, nature, the posthuman and Draesner’s reception of English literature and medieval culture. A comprehensive bibliography, commissioned interview and original writing by Draesner make the volume a valuable research tool for scholars and students.

This will become essential reading for all those interested in Draesner, women’s writing, literature and history, and contemporary German prose and poetry.