Two Writers Won the Raffle. How Very Fitting
It’s been a few days since I announced the raffle celebrating the 20th anniversary my first short story’s publication. Now for why it has taken me so long announcing the winner just see my previous post about being a working writer. But I am happy to report that the raffle has concluded, the winner determined, and guess what? There is not one winner, but two.
With much happiness I can report that both winners are published writers, whose opinion I value very much. And even though they come from completely different walks of life, I am lucky to have been able to call them my friends for several decades already. In order to celebrate their well-deserved luck, I wanted to share a little bit about their phenomenal books and why you need them on your reading lists immediately.
Angelika Morini and I met many years ago as colleagues right outside of Frankfurt. While I left my job there after a few years and moved back to Vienna, our friendship has endured the distance, and even grown stronger over our mutual love of writing. Angelika has poured her heart and soul into her brilliant debut novel, “Do You See Me Now”, where she follows a young woman on her very own Hero’s Journey. Watching her protagonist, Hanna, break away from a hollow line of people-pleasing to face the painful depths of the secrets her family has done so much to sweep under the rug feels incredibly raw. With her book, Angelika has crafted a deeply empathetic blueprint for personal healing. She still lives right outside of Frankfurt with her family and her cat Eeva, pictured above, and we try to see each other as often as possible.
Johanna Grillmayer and I have known each other even longer: we shared a thesis advisor at the University of Vienna' History Department. After we graduated I immediately left for my Master's program in the US, but we kept in touch and rekindled our friendship after several years. Since Johanna is a journalist, I was not surprised when she revealed that she was writing a novel in her spare time - but I was not prepared for what she had created! An utterly captivating literary world across her striking trilogy “That’s life in Dystopia”, “Ein sicherer Ort”, and “Ein guter Mann”, where the Hero’s Journey is taken to entirely uncharted territory. Something happens during the opening chapters of her first novel, and then the world as we know it does not exist anymore. No explanation given. A group of individuals around Jola are dropped into a literal clean slate from one second to the other - they need to figure out how to survive in this new reality, and do so fast. Johanna manages to describe this without the standard post-apocalyptic clichés, and the book sales of her trilogy give her credit. She proves that the ultimate victory is sometimes not simply surviving the altered status quo, but rather finding the optimism to create a utopia from the ashes of our civilization.
Please join me in congratulation both of these amazing women! And make sure you grab copies of their books (and mine), and support their incredible work.
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