On Anna Gmeyner and Elisabeth de Waal: Talk

Elisabeth de Waal

Persephone Bookshop, London

Dr Nadia Valman, senior lecturer in the Department of English at Queen Mary University of London, will give a talk on Anna Gmeyner and Elisabeth de Waal on Tuesday September 17th from 6–8pm. Wine and cheese straws will be served.

Anna Gmeyner (born Vienna 1902, died England 1991) was an exiled German/Austrian author, playwright and scriptwriter, who is now best known for her novel Manja (1939). She also wrote under the names Anna Reiner and Anna Morduch. Her daughter was the children’s writer Eva Ibbotson. Written in London, Manja opens, radically, with five conception scenes one night in 1920. Set in the turbulent Germany of the Weimar Republic, it goes on to describe the lives of the children and their families until 1933 when the Nazis came to power. Manja was first published in English in September 1939, and re-published by Persephone Books in 2003.

Elisabeth de Waal, née von Ephrussi (born Vienna 1899, died England 1991), completed a doctorate in economics at the University of Vienna, and lived in Paris and Switzerland before settling in Tunbridge Wells in 1939. She wrote five unpublished novels, two in German and three in English, including The Exiles Return  and Milton Place in the late 1950s, both of them published for the first time by Persephone Books, the latter just this year. Her grandson is the ceramicist and writer Edmund de Waal.

£10.

Telephone 0207 242 9292 to book.