Michael Winkler – författare

Friedrich Froebel, the ‘father of kindergarten’, is one of the most influential pedagogues of the 19th century. However, relatively little is known about his life, his successes and failures, and his personal relationships. Based on many untranslated and unknown letters, this new biography presents Froebel as a brilliant but also flawed man. Beginning with his childhood and the early death of his mother, as well as his difficult relationship with his father and stepmother, we see the early seeds of Froebel’s interest in children and the training of early childhood practitioners. While Froebel lacked basic academic knowledge due to his poor early education, he was able to overcome these deficits and found an educational institute, and develop ground-breaking educational theories about play and pedagogy. He authored multiple books, including his most famous work The Education of Man. The focus of this book, though, is not on Froebel’s educational theories but on his complicated relationships with his family, the Keilhau community, and the mother of one of his pupils, Caroline von Holzhausen, whom he called the “rune of his life”. After many personal and professional disappointments, Froebel finally came up with the idea that made him famous until today: kindergarten. In the last decade of his life, he became a salesman of this new idea and worked tirelessly for the establishment of the kindergarten movement. However, when the Prussian government banned kindergarten shortly before his death, Froebel was broken – even if kindergarten lives until today.

Friedrich Froebel, the ‘father of kindergarten’, is one of the most influential pedagogues of the 19th century. However, relatively little is known about his life, his successes and failures, and his personal relationships. Based on many untranslated and unknown letters, this new biography presents Froebel as a brilliant but also flawed man. Beginning with his childhood and the early death of his mother, as well as his difficult relationship with his father and stepmother, we see the early seeds of Froebel’s interest in children and the training of early childhood practitioners. While Froebel lacked basic academic knowledge due to his poor early education, he was able to overcome these deficits and found an educational institute, and develop ground-breaking educational theories about play and pedagogy. He authored multiple books, including his most famous work The Education of Man. The focus of this book, though, is not on Froebel’s educational theories but on his complicated relationships with his family, the Keilhau community, and the mother of one of his pupils, Caroline von Holzhausen, whom he called the “rune of his life”. After many personal and professional disappointments, Froebel finally came up with the idea that made him famous until today: kindergarten. In the last decade of his life, he became a salesman of this new idea and worked tirelessly for the establishment of the kindergarten movement. However, when the Prussian government banned kindergarten shortly before his death, Froebel was broken – even if kindergarten lives until today.

Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award Pain was Joe Grim’s self-expression, his livelihood and reason for being. He rarely won a fight, but in the early decades of the twentieth century Grim became a folk hero, distinguishing himself for his extraordinary ability to withstand physical punishment. In this wild and expansive novel Michael Winkler tells the story of Grim’s 1908–9 tour of Australia, bending genres and histories into a kaleidoscopic investigation of pain, masculinity, and narrative. The body in pain exists at the very limits of language. And yet Grimmish suggests that pain is also the most familiar and universal human condition – and, perhaps, the secret source of the human impulse to tell stories. By turns hilarious and tragic, vulnerable and tough, Grimmish is a truly a one of a kind – in the words of J. M. Coetzee, ‘the strangest book you are likely to read this year.’