Political and ethical questions lie at the center of Obexer’s work. From a distinctly feminist perspective, she investigates the ways language shapes structures of power, belonging, and exclusion. Her writing engages with migration and displacement, competing visions of Europe, and the rights of marginalized communities—particularly queer people, women, and animals. Shaped by her experience of growing up in a multilingual border region, she brings a nuanced understanding of identity, borders, and cultural memory to her essays, plays, radio dramas, and fiction.

In her autobiographical novel Europas längster Sommer, translated as Europe’s Longest Summer by Katrin Sieg and nominated for the 2017 Bachmann Award, Obexer follows a narrator traveling by train from her childhood home in South Tyrol to Berlin to receive her German naturalization certificate. During the journey, her personal memories of navigating European bureaucracy intersect with the contemporary migrant crisis. When young non-European men board near the Brenner Pass, only to be detained by police at Rosenheim, the narrator confronts the stark divide between her privileges as an EU citizen and their precarious status. This encounter sharply contrasts with her own celebrated citizenship ceremony, prompting deeper reflection on who is granted free movement and who remains excluded. Pairing intimate memoir with political critique, Obexer exposes the double standards of the European ideal.

Join us for a German reading from Europas längster Sommer with English translation slides, followed by a conversation in English about Obexer’s oeuvre and translating this novel with the author and Professors Katrin Sieg (Georgetown University) and Sonja Klocke (UW-Madison).

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About the author: Maxi Obexer is a prominent German-language author and playwright whose work examines language, power, and political imagination. Raised in South Tyrol and thus in fact in Italy, and based in Berlin, she has earned numerous accolades, including the Robert-Geisendörfer-Prize, the Eurodram Prize, the Alice Salomon Poetics Prize, and a Bachmann Prize nomination. Her fundamentally feminist writing addresses issues of migration, European identity, feminist politics, and non-human subjecthood. Co-founder of the New Institute for Dramatic Writing and former interim co-president of PEN Center Germany, Obexer has taught at Dartmouth College, Georgetown University, the University of Arts (Universität der Künste) Berlin, and the Literaturinstitut Leipzig. We are honored to have her at UW–Madison as Max Kade Writer in Residence in the fall of 2026.