Sabine Lange Germany

Sabine Lange was born in June 1953 in Stralsund, in what was then the German Democratic Republic. She grew up in a very musical family and herself won a national prize for music at the age of 13 as the pianist in a piano trio which she formed with two of her brothers. Following her studies in Mathematics and Education, she taught at a secondary school in Feldberg and it was here that she first started to write poetry - as a form of escape, a way of expressing her longing for a different life. She subsequently studied Music and worked as a freelance music teacher and musician until, in 1984, she was appointed archivist in the Hans Fallada Archive in Feldberg.
The fifteen years she spent working with the manuscripts and papers of one of Germany's most popular twentieth-century writers proved to be a most productive period in which she began to publish her own poetry as well as essays and books on Fallada.

The Fishermen Sleep, originally published in German in 1994 as 'Immer zu Fuss', is her first volume of poetry. She has said of her poetry: I'm not a political poet - I'm more interested in the landscape of the soul ('Seelenlandschaft').

The poems in this anthology are mostly poems written in the GDR. The last one in the collection, The Fishermen, was awarded the Alfred Gesswein Prize in Austria. Since 1999 Sabine Lange has completed a second volume of poetry and is currently working on the publication of her diaries (1984-1999) as well as a book on the role of the GDR Ministry for State Security ("Stasi") in the formulation of literary policy in the Fallada Archive.

(2005)