At the end of this strange and anxious year, I’m once more looking back at the last 12 months to create a round up of some of the things I’ve been up to. In March, my first book in German (translated by Ulrike Kretschmer) was published – AM RAND: UM GANZ BERLIN. In December, we launched STORIES FROM THE SQUARE, a series of short stories commissioned by The Circus in Berlin and which you can listen to me read if you follow the link.

Here is what else I have been up to:

For Lit Hub (essay): ‘What can the artist do in dark times‘, on the life and legacy of Käthe Kollwitz.
For Metamorphosen 27 (short story): ‘Walking to remember‘.
For Stadio (essay): ‘Six weeks in Springtime‘.
For hidden europe magazine (essay): ‘Carried on the wind: Walking with Rilke in Duino‘.
For Caught by the River (obituary): ‘Caught by the Reaper: Jan Morris‘.
For the exhibition BERLIN.LOKAL-ZEIT (essay): ‘Berlin Springtime‘ (audio version).
For Lit Hub (essay): ‘Can the German Path to Truth and Reconciliation Work in America?‘.
For Caught by the River (essay): ‘Shadows and Reflections‘, on the artwork of Rob Piercy.
For hidden europe magazine (essay): ‘The 21.48 from Aachen‘.

For Europe by Rail I wrote a monthly short essay from March to December. You can see the archive of pieces here, but I wanted to  flag up the August essay ‘A Little Train in the Mountains‘, a tribute to Tony Judt on the tenth anniversary of his death.

We continued our work on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, and I was privileged to work with wonderful writers throughout the year. My own pieces for the journal are here and a couple of my favourites are:
‘Irreplaceable – An interview with Julian Hoffman‘.
‘Jenny Sturgeon, Nan Shepherd and The Living Mountain‘.
‘At Grunewald station: Memory and the danger of forgetting‘.

There are a couple of videos of events we managed to do during this strange year, including this one (in German) about my book AM RAND, and this one (in English) about Wanderlust and Memories of Elsewhere. I was also very honoured to be invited to Dortmund to take part in a panel discussion as part of the ‘The Other Side‘ exhibition at the Dortmunder U. 

What of next year? I’m currently in the middle of writing a book about Germany’s Harz mountains and Heinrich Heine, tentatively to appear in 2022, and October 2021 will see the publication of my novella IN THE PINES, accompanied by photography from Eymelt Sehmer. It’s being published by Influx Press and all the details are here.

Finally, and in connection to Influx. Early in the first lockdown we made some short films featuring readings from our books. Here’s mine for my Berlin novel BUILT ON SAND, which was published by Influx in 2019.