crucefix

In Case of Loss gathers the best of Lutz Seiler’s non-fiction from the last twenty-five years, revealing essays that are different to, but on a par with, his fiction and poetry. Seiler’s anecdotal and associative pieces throw fascinating light on literature and his background, not least the environmental and human catastrophe of the Soviet-era mining in the community he grew up in, ’the tired villages . . . beneath which lay the ore, uranium’. Other essays focus on poetry, including his awakening to it while waiting in an army truck on his military service, and there are pieces on German poets such as Ernst Meister, Jürgen Becker and Peter Huchel. The title essay describes the poet Huchel’s notebook, a kind of dictionary of images organised by mood and location.
Providing a perfect entry to Seiler’s work, In Case of Loss sees one of Europe’s most original writers speak with openness and insight in essays full of a poet’s attention to the importance of often overlooked objects and lives.

Poet, novelist
and essayist Lutz Seiler was born in Gera, Thuringia, in 1963 and today lives
in Wilhelmshorst, near Berlin, and in Stockholm. His writing has won many prizes,
including the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, the Ingeborg Bachmann and the German
Book Prize, and been translated into twenty-five languages.

Martyn Crucefix has published six full
collections of poetry. His translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies was shortlisted for the 2007 Popescu Prize for
European Poetry Translation, whileThese Numbered Days, translations of poems
by Peter Huchel, won the 2020 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize. His new collection
Between A Drowning Man was published
in 2023