Katrin: The Tale of a Young Writer

Katrin. The Tale of a Young Writer is a novel by the artist Unica Zürn (Berlin 1916–Paris 1970). It was written in 1953, although it would never be published in her lifetime. This is the first translation of the tale from German into English. Zürn tells the story of fifteen-year-old motherless Katrin, an aspiring writer, who lives with her father, also a writer. The novel is set in an imaginary world, a metropolis called Linit, split into three levels: Oberstadt (Hightown), Mittelstadt (Middletown) and Unterstadt (Lowtown), overlooked by a Volcano where the artists live and crossed by the river Emil. Presented as a book for children, apparently written for her own daughter (named Katrin), Katrin also draws on the personal biography of Zürn herself, in terms of her relationship with her father and the city of Berlin after WWII, and her experience with people on the margins of a society characterised by great tensions.