On fathers and daughters – the tale of an impossible relationship.

AUFRUHR DER MEERESTIERE
[An Uprising of Sea Creatures]
by Marie Gamillscheg
Luchterhand/Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe, September 2022

Luise is intelligent, Luise is independent, Luise is an island. She has also gained a reputation as an excellent marine biologist. Her specialty is the sea walnut, a ghostly illuminated jellyfish living in the dark waters of the oceans. When Luise is asked to go to Graz for a project with a famous zoo, she says yes right away. But Graz is the town she grew up in and the town where her estranged father, who is ill, still lives – and where the silence between them began, long ago…
Marie Gamillscheg writes compellingly and vividly about the process of freeing ourselves from our childhood, our body, and the rules that we believe to be our own – but which others have determined for us. At the same time, this novel is an attempt to describe the inherent impossibility of father-daughter relationships.

Marie Gamillscheg, born in Graz in 1992, lives and works in Berlin, freelancing as a journalist and contributing to ZEIT Campus and other media. She was awarded the city of Graz literature promotion prize in 2015 and the New German Fiction Prize. In 2016 she took part in the Klagenfurt Literature Course and was awarded a working stipend by the Berlin Senate. Her works have been published in many magazines and anthologies. Her novel All That Shines topped the ORF list of best books, was nominated for the aspekte Literature Prize and won the Austrian Book Prize for the Best Debut Novel in 2018.