Sophie Herxheimer – författare

The Sunday Times Poetry Book of the Year 2017Velkom to Inklandt is a collection of poems in which Sophie Herxheimer brings to life the voice of her German Jewish Grent Muzzer Liesel, whose somewhat abrasive but eminently humane perspektiff she's been unable to forget.Liesel came to live in Britain in 1938, with her young family. Her husband was one of many scientists saved by the speedily set up Council for Academic Refugees.Playing on the difficulties of the English lenkvitch and vokebulerry, the poems tell of an immigrant's attempts to fit in and make her home in a new country at war with her own.This fascinating sequence addresses alienation, survival, friendship, marriage, motherhood and loss against a backdrop of a London which has almost disappeared but at the same time remains straynchly familiar.

This is the story of an ordinary little boy, Ib Katznelson, swept up in the cataclysmic tides of fascism, war and propaganda. A generation later, his daughter-in-law, ­ filmmaker Sarah Gavron, inspired by Ib's story, ­finds artist-poet Sophie Herxheimer to collaborate on telling it in a new, visual form.We follow Ib and his family's attempt to escape Denmark in 1943, and their eventual arrival at Theresienstadt, the 'model' concentration camp. Here the Nazis' horrors were hidden from the world, yet it was also a place where, somehow, art and culture flourished in secret. Satirical cabarets entertained the starving in desolate attics, children made breathtaking works of art, huge choirs sang together about death.This epic graphic novel contains all of life, from its darkest moments to its most precious and surprising joys. It is a tribute to those for whom the imagination was their only escape: a way not to just to survive, but to stay human.