Antje Rávik Strubel

Antje Rávik Strubel, also known as Antje Rávic Strubel (born 12 April 1974) is a German writer, translator, and literary critic. She lives in Potsdam.

Life

Antje Strubel was born in Potsdam and grew up in Ludwigsfelde, East Germany. After leaving school, she first worked as a bookseller in Potsdam, and then studied literature, psychology and American studies in Potsdam and New York. In New York she also worked as a lighting assistant in a theater. She has held residencies as a writer and been a guest professor at various institutions and universities in Germany, the United States, and Finland. She lives and works as a writer and translator in Potsdam, Germany.

With the publication of her first novel, Offene Blende, Strubel added the name Rávik (previously Rávic) to her legal name to designate her writing identity. Since 2018, she spells this writing name Rávik.

Critical reception

Rávik Strubel is part of a generation of writers who were born in East Germany but started publishing after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Much of her fiction deals with identity and transformation in contemporary Europe. In 2001, she published her first two novels, Offene Blende and Unter Schnee (translated as Snowed Under). That year she also received the Ernst Willner Prize in Klagenfurt. Like many of her texts, both of her first novels have main characters born in East Germany, and both novels focus on these women as they travel abroad, explore identity through new jobs and relationships, and reinvent themselves in Europe or America after the fall of the Wall. These are also themes that we find in her later work.

In 2002, Rávik Strubel published her third novel, Fremd gehen, and in 2003 she won the Roswitha Prize and the German Critics Prize.