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Becoming Kathrine Talbot: A Jewish Refugee and the Novelist She Invented
In 1935, when she was fourteen years old, Ilse Gross fled Germany for the safety of England. Alone. Seventeen years later, she published her audacious first novel Fire in the Sun. Her pen name: Kathrine Talbot. Her German Jewish identity she carefully concealed. Becoming Kathrine Talbot: A Jewish Refugee and the Novelist She Invented, first published in German in 2022, recreates the life of a refugee who lost her parents and sister in the Holocaust and who resisted telling their stories until it was almost too late. Only at the end of her life did she turn her family’s fate into prose.
In the just-published English translation of his book, Professor Dr. Christoph Ribbat of the University of Paderborn, Germany, traces the life of a once well-known but now nearly forgotten 20th century novelist from an Isle of Man internment camp to postwar Cornwall, New York, and California, and then to a green hill in Sussex. He will be joined for this discussion of the new publication by Professor Sue Vice of the University of Sheffield, who has written: ‘Christoph Ribbat’s remarkable book is a creative biography and literary retrieval of Kathrine Talbot, née Ilse Gross … It will make everyone who reads it reconsider what they believe they know about the lives of refugees, and rush to find copies of Talbot’s fiction.’
Please note that those signed up to attend this event will be able to benefit from a 20% discount on the cover price of the book.