Ulli Lust and Marcel Beyer

Trans. by John Brownjohn & Nika Knight

Voices In the Dark

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Ulli Lust’s award-winning memoir Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life was called a “sprawling, meditative graphic novel [that] ripples with exuberance” by the New York Times. Her published work includes pieces of comics journalism as well as erotic-mythological poems. She runs the online publishing company www.electrocomics.com. Born in Vienna, she lives and works in Berlin.

Marcel Beyer is a lauded German novelist whose 1995 novel Flughunde (translated into English as The Karnau Tapes) was the basis for Ulli Lust’s graphic novel, Voices in the Dark. His many honors include the 2014 Kleist Prize and the 2016 Georg Büchner Prize.

John Brownjohn is the translator of Marcel Beyer’s The Karnau Tapes, upon which Ulli Lust’s graphic novel Voices in the Dark is based. He has translated more than 160 books, and won the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German translation three times and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize once. He has also collaborated several times with the filmmaker Roman Polanski.

Nika Knight adapted John Brownjohn’s translation of Marcel Beyer’s The Karnau Tapes for Ulli Lust’s Voices in the Dark. She is a staff writer for CommonDreams.org, and her writing and reporting also appear in Grist, Guernica, Narratively, and other places. She lives in Maine.