Reading: Author Carolina Schutti - Thiersee

A village in the late 80s: Two daughters grow up without fathers. One has thrown himself off a bridge and the other is over the hills after the violent act of procreation, at least that's what the mother tells them. With fairy tales, lies and clever manipulation she tries to shield her "princesses" from the outside world and at the same time bind them to herself. The creepy fairy-tale-like isolation of the girls, who bravely fight their way through precarious everyday life, begins to crack when the older of the two discovers the power of curiosity and the power of books, and begins to suspect that the world has more in store for them than just this small, laboriously patched-together life. Carolina Schutti's powerful, poetic novel that gets under your skin is about how to break free from confinement. Carolina Schutti was born in Innsbruck in 1976. She studied German, English, American studies and classical guitar and completed a vocal training. After completing her doctorate on Elias Canetti, she was an editor at the University of Florence before publishing her debut novel Wer getragen wird, braucht keine Schuhe, which was nominated for the Rauris Literature Prize, in 2010. The second novel Einmal muss ich über weiches Gras gelaufen (2012) was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature, in 2015 the novella Eulen fliegen lautlos (Alois Vogel Literature Prize) was published, followed by Patagonia in 2020. She has also written radio plays, texts for interdisciplinary theater projects, and a volume of poetry (nervenfieber, 2018). In early 2021, the novel Der Himmel ist ein kleiner Kreis (Heaven is a Small Circle) was published by the literary publishing house Droschl; she was invited to the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize 2020 with an excerpt from it. Her books have been awarded numerous prizes and scholarships as well as translated into seventeen languages. In early 2023, her new novel Meeresbrise was published, which received a recommendation for the Anglo-American world and is now available in a second edition.