Higher Ground

Anke Stelling was born in 1971, in Ulm, Germany. She studied at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. Stelling is a multi-award-winning novelist whose previous works have been much acclaimed. Higher Ground is the first of her novels to be translated into English. Stelling lives and works in Berlin.Lucy Jones studied German at UEA with W.G. Sebald, and worked as a freelance photographer before becoming a translator. She has lived in Berlin since 1998, where she heads Transfiction, a translators’ collective, and runs the Fiction Canteen reading series. She translates literary fiction, art texts, plays, and journalism from German. Her latest translations include Blueprint, by Theresia Enzensberger, I Have No Regrets: diaries 1955—1963, by Brigitte Reimann, and The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, by Silke Scheuermann. She has published her own writing in SAND, Visual Verse, Pigeon Papers NY, and 3AM Magazine.

‘Stelling is brilliant on the quantum universe of parenting, the sheer unpredictability of it … The novel moves effortlessly between time periods in recent German history and builds up the composite picture of a generation that has too often seen many of its ideals disappear into trust funds … compelling.’