Ulf Geyersbach
Ulf Geyersbach was born in Erfurt, East Germany, on a Sunday in August in 1969, just two weeks after Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon. Moving westward as an adolescent in 1976 to the wine capital of Mainz taught him that there are two sides to every wall. He paid for this discovery with his Thuringian dialect, but, having fled the socialist education methods, he made up for the loss by gaining permission to write with his left hand. After the fall of the Wall, Ulf set out to prove that even left-handed people can go to university, testing his hypothesis extensively in Mainz, Freiburg, Lyon, and Berlin.
Reading material that left its mark on him include the Quelle mail-order catalogue, The Hobbit, Henscheid, Rühmkorf, Fauser, Brinkmann, Caser, the Berliner Kurier tabloid, Nabokov, Flaubert, Svevo, Gernhardt, and Egner.
Completed a graduate degree in philosophy in Lyon with a thesis on Walter Benjamin, which was fashionable at the time. Senior executive intern and other editorial traineeships in publishing houses and literary agencies in Berlin, Munich, and New York. Freelance editor since April 2000 for fiction and general non-fiction; since 2002, office in the text etage.
In 1999 Ulf started and quickly abandoned attempts at literary criticism, but that chapter is not over yet. Together with Nadja Bentz he coordinates the New Literature Berlin series for Morpheo publishers, which–if one can believe the media for a change–will soon strike it big. In 2001 Ulf conceived and edited the live CD "asphaltpoeten" released by kein & aber. The product, an anthology of the best from Berlin’s reading stages, easily made it into the talking book database at the Goethe Institute in Copenhagen. What will the future bring? For the common book freak, a story of Ullstein books: 100 Jahre Ullstein Bücher im Zeichen der Eule (with Anne Enderlein); and to help suffering hypochondriacs relieve their phantom pain: Schöner Leiden (a collection of texts by and about hypochondriacs, together with Rainer Wieland), which will appear in a preventive, blood-pressure-lowering special format in autumn 2004 from Argon Press.
Ulf Geyersbach reads and writes in Berlin.
Selected titles edited by Ulf Geyersbach: Alain Robert: Mit nackten Händen, Ullstein Metropolis 1999; Henry Roth: Die Entfesselung (German trans. of From Bondage), Ullstein 2000; Tom McNeal: Der Bus nach Nirgendwo (German trans. of Goodnight, Nebraska), Goldmann 2001; Dietmar Dath: Höhenrausch. Die Mathematik des XX. Jahrhunderts in zwanzig Gehirnen, Eichborn 2003.
contact: ulfgey(@)gmx.de