Reading and discussion with the author Lorena Simmel
When she runs out of money for her studies in Berlin, the young first-person narrator travels to her home village of Ferymont in Switzerland to work there for a season as an agricultural assistant. While working in the fields, she befriends Daria, who travels from Moldova with her family every year to earn money as a seasonal worker on farms in the Swiss Lake District. The closeness that develops between the two young women also brings the imbalance between the Western and Eastern European regions into focus.
"Ferymont" is a literary portrait of a region in the heart of Europe that addresses an often invisible reality. A quiet novel that questions capitalist working conditions with linguistic virtuosity and sensitively focuses on the stories of seasonal workers.
Lorena Simmel will be awarded the Robert Walser Prize for this novel in fall 2024.
Lorena Simmel, born in Fribourg in 1988 and raised in Switzerland, studied Literary Writing at the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel/Bienne and European Literatures at Humboldt University in Berlin and in Warsaw.
She has published poems, prose and essays in EDIT, Neue Rundschau and STILL, among others, and was a scholarship holder of the 16th Klagenfurt Literature Course.
In 2022 she was a literature scholarship holder of the Jürgen Ponto Foundation.
She received the Berlin Senate's working grant for literature for her debut novel "Ferymont".
Lorena Simmel lives in Berlin.
