In The City and the World Gregor Hens threads memoir with travelogue, philosophy, photography and references from a wide variety of writers and thinkers to consider the phenomenon of the contemporary city and our place within it.
Gregor Hens is a German writer of fiction and creative nonfiction, and a literary translator. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and taught linguistics in the US for more than twenty years. He was a writer in residence at Magdalene College in Cambridge and has been shortlisted, with Rawi Hage, for the International Literature Prize (Berlin). He has notably translated Will Self and Kurt Vonnegut into German. Hens currently teaches Urban Studies and Creative Writing at the Free University in Berlin. His memoir Nicotine was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2015.
Jen Calleja has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for her translations of German-language literature. Her own books include Fair: The Life-Art of Translation (Prototype), Vehicle: a verse novel (Prototype), Goblinhood: Goblin as a Mode (Rough Trade Books) and Dust Sucker (Makina Books). She is co-publisher at Praspar Press, which is dedicated to Maltese literature in English and English translation.
