The ballad of the vacuum-packed chicken

Description

Lucie Rico talks to translator Milena Adam about her book “The Ballad of the Vacuum-Packed Chicken.” Together they read passages from the French original and the German translation.

“Hannah has been a vegetarian since she was young. She lives in the city and has few connections to the village life of her childhood. However, when her mother dies, she returns to their chicken farm - temporarily, she thinks, until everything is sorted out. But country life, with all its beauty and horror, takes hold of her, and Hannah soon develops a very special relationship with the animals: she slaughters and vacuum-packs them, but says goodbye to each chicken with its own biography, which is included in the packaging. This gesture of appreciation gives rise to a marketing project that takes on crazy proportions: “Hannah's chickens” become a supermarket hit with unexpected consequences for the life and limb of people and animals. - In Lucie Rico's novel, which is as amusing as it is crazy, the protagonist's life slowly but surely gets out of control within the relentless pecking order of the chicken coop, the meat industry and the human world, and the path from the idyll of the farm to the garish meat counter seems shorter than expected.

Lucie Rico, born in Perpignan in 1988, writes films in Aubervilliers, books in Perpignan and teaches literary writing in Clermont-Ferrand. The Ballad of the Vacuum-Packed Chicken won the Prix du roman d'écologie and the Cheval Blanc Literature Prize in 2021.

Milena Adam, born in Hamburg in 1991, is a translator and interpreter from French and English. For Matthes & Seitz Berlin she translated Sandra Newman, Eileen Myles, Alain Damasio and Cal Flyn, among others. She lives in Berlin.

Welcome: Institut Français Bremen / Book table: Albatros bookstore.

Event in cooperation with the Institut Français Bremen.

Please register at stabi-hb.de

Where and when

Free event