OVER THE LAST TWO DECADES, interest in transnational writing has steadily increased. A growing media coverage and the heightened interest of publishing houses have given authors of non-German or “hyphenated” origin a higher profile in the public sphere and the literary market place. Prestigious literary awards such as the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize — founded in 1985 — have promoted the reception of writers who publish in German although it is not their first language. In January 2010, Terézia Mora, whose highly acclaimed first novel Alle Tage (2004; Day In Day Out, 2007) is the focus of this chapter, won this important prize for her literary work to date and her manifold activities as a translator and mediator between German and Hungarian culture.

Mora was born in 1971 in Sopron in Hungary, in the border region close to Austria where she grew up as part of the German-speaking minority. Having been brought up “in an Austrian dialect mixed with Hungarian,” she learned how to formally write and read German only in high school. When the borders were crumbling in the Eastern Bloc, Mora almost instantly took advantage of her “historical luck” and made her way to Berlin where she has lived since 1990. Having two native languages, she is technically not an “exophonic” writer but a native speaker of a hybrid identity, which made settling in postunification Germany easier and motivated her choice to make German her literary language. Mora first studied Hungarian literature and theater studies at Humboldt University, then script writing at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin. She is also a well-known literary translator from the Hungarian and has translated works by István Örkény and Peter Esterházy, among others. Since 1998 Mora has worked as a freelance author writing prose, plays for the stage, and scripts for television.

Her literary work to date is characterized by thematic variety, a realistic style of narration that does not psychologize the characters, and an idiosyncratic aesthetic style. The eleven stories in her first book Seltsame Materie (Strange matter, 1999) are set in the same border region where Mora grew up. They realistically narrate what life is like in the provincial villages on the Hungarian side of Neusiedler Lake and tell of a crumbling world full of violence, alcoholism, and social marginalization.