Merck-Preis 2025, Grand Medal of Honor of the City of Zurich
Troubling news and gloomy forecasts characterize the present and preoccupy the eminent Swiss author Ilma Rakusa. In diary prose, poems, monologues, and dialogues, she traces—over a span of two and a half years beginning in the summer of 2022 — an inner journey reflected in the mirror of the outside world.
She contemplates the world’s crises with horror and dismay, wrestles with doubt and despair. With clarity of vision and sharp judgment, she eloquently denounces injustice and despotism, appeals to humanity and reason, and writes with deep empathy about the everyday lives of those who suffer.
In this book of reflections, the transience of life is ever present—yet so too are vitality, the joy found in small things, and, above all, love: love of family and friends, of literature and art. The personal and the political are interwoven throughout Rakusa‘s observations and reflections of the present.
Previous works have been translated to 14 languages.
The Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia awards grants for translations.
»With a wealth of experience and stimulating detail, Rakusa writes not from analytical distance, but from personal concern; her writings, which combine sensuality and poetry with reflection, form a passionate soliloquy and a great essay on the question of what language can achieve in a seemingly hopeless present.« (Manfred Bosch, ekz)
»This magnificent book by the grande dame of literature, who is approaching her 80th birthday, offers no ready-made solutions to the evils of the world. Rather, it opens up a space of seemingly inexhaustible potential, focused on never ceasing to follow one’s longing for human coexistence in peace and freedom.« (schreibfertig.com)
»Ilma Rakusa has always understood how to blend the everyday with the sublime, the personal with the universal, the comical with the tragic. This is also true of this multi-layered chronicle of the recent past.« (Ulrike Sárkány, Lesart)
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