From Both Sides Now: Nature Writing at Literary Festivals

This contribution examines how literary festivals in Europe present nature writing as part of their efforts to become more sustainable and to what extent this happens within a wider publishing system. In recent years, several festivals in the German-speaking world have featured events on nature writing. This seems to be symptomatic of a new visibility of nature writing within the book market. Nature writing’s genre-bending blend of artistic and scientific discourse has been sitting uneasily with the established categories of Sachbuch (nonfiction) and Belletristik (fiction) in the German publishing world. The chapter introduces and depicts literary festivals as agents in the book market that can help make a genre accessible to wider audiences. It concludes with the transcript of a panel discussion on the new popularity of nature writing in Germany. This event took place as part of a special section on nature writing at the 2018 International Literature Festival Berlin. The writers Marion Poschmann and Judith Schalansky speak about their understanding of nature writing and discuss influences and legacies with literary scholar Susanne Scharnowski.