The Munich Literature Festival is an annual international literary event held, since 2025, in spring, and is considered a literary highlight in Munich's cultural calendar. The literary program "forum:autoren" is curated annually by different writers. Examples of the curatorial leitmotifs of recent years include "Was wir erben, was wir hinterlassen" (2023, Lukas Bärfuss), "Sprachen der Liebe. How do we want to live?" (2025, Daniel Schreiber).

Freedom. This is the theme that Dana Grigorcea has chosen as the leitmotif of this year's Literaturfest München (April 21-30). An intelligent and courageous decision ( strengthened by the removal of Victor Orbán in Hungary a few days before the opening) - and hardly surprising. After all, nothing runs as continuously through the life, work and thoughts of this Swiss-Romanian writer as the question of freedom - the defining question of our time. There is nothing both authors defend with more verve, passion and defiant certainty than their conviction of the freedom of art, the freedom in art, the freedom that art gives.

When I meet Dana for a chat, Perikles literally opens the door to her. We meet at Café Bohemia on Zurich's Kreuzplatz, one of those elegant cafés reminiscent of the heyday of European urban bohemia. Perikles has been here writing all morning and now has to rush off to cook lunch for their two teenage children. At home, too, he is often the first one at his desk in the morning and greets Dana, his first reader, with coffee and a sample of that morning's work.
While he hurries off, Dana and I are ushered into a quiet adjoining room where we have peace and time. We make the most of both - one of Dana's charming qualities is that once she's there, she's fully engaged, immersing herself in the conversation and getting easily carried away. Our meeting explains a little about how the two of them manage to lead such a productive and creative life: teamwork, mutual appreciation, and a love of literature, which they also celebrate as publishers.

They met at the Literarisches Colloqium Berlin, when Perikles Monioudis was already a celebrated author of several novels and short story collections, including Die Trüffelsucherin (The Truffle Hunter), Deutschlandflug (Flight to Germany), and Eis (Ice). Born in 1966 as the son of Greek immigrants in the canton of Glarus, he completed his doctorate at the University of Zurich, but, in addition to writing, he primarily earned his living for many years as a journalist (mainly for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung) and as a university lecturer in Switzerland and abroad – as did his current wife, Dana.

Dana Grigorcea, born in 1979 in what was then still communist Bucharest, attended German grammar school there and, as a young woman, took full advantage of the freedom that followed reunification: she studied in Bucharest, Ghent, Brussels and Krems (Austria) and worked as a journalist in Vienna (Kurier), Bonn (Deutsche Welle) and Strasbourg (ARTE). She speaks six languages and understands a seventh. "But if my children want to tease me, they still correct my German" she adds, laughing. Her first publication, a travelogue, appeared without her involvement in Romania's leading literary magazine and earned her effusive critical acclaim as "a shining star in the firmament of Romanian literature". But that didn't last long as she soon decided to switch to German, the language "with those long sentences and the verb at the end like a scorpion's sting that can change everything." She learned German as a small child with a family friend. "We went for a walk and she told me the fairy tale of Sterntaler. It was a delight." The German school in Bucharest, primarily aimed at the German-speaking minority, had almost snuffed out her joy of the language. But then, fortunately, came the fall of communism and a period of upheaval, during which schoolbooks had to be rewritten and adventurous young Germans flooded into the country with Thomas Mann, Max Frisch and Bertolt Brecht in their luggage. As soon as she spent more time in German-speaking regions, Dana Grigorcea became a German-language author, and the foreignness of her second language became somehow liberating: "Literature is always a role-playing game. And this game takes on an additional dimension when you choose a new language. You speak differently, you become a different person."

Success proved her right: Dana won the Swiss Literary Pearl with her first book Baba Rada oder die Liebe ist vergänglich wie die Kopfhaare (Baba Rada or Love is as fleeting as the hair on your head), which was followed in quick succession by An Instinctive Feeling of Innocence, Dracula Park, Das Gewicht eines Vogels beim Fliegen (The Weight of a Bird Flying), and, most recently, Dancing Woman, Blue Rooster; all equally enthusiastically received by critics and the public alike. In 2015, she was shortlisted for the Swiss Book Prize and won the 3sat Prize as part of the 2015 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. In 2021, she was longlisted for the German Book Prize and received the Swiss Literature Prize from the Federal Office of Culture.
At the same time, Perikles Monioudis published a biography of Robert Walser, four novels with Rimbaud Verlag (including Die Stadt an den Golfen (The City on the Gulfs) and Azra und Kosmás) as well as Land and the novel Frederick about Fred Astaire with dtv.

Further literary festivals on Literatur.Review: Ekushey Book Fair (Dhaka, Bangladesh), Days of German-Language Literature (Klagenfurt, Austria), ilb (Berlin, Germany), Frankfurt Book Fair (Frankfurt, Germany), Harare International Literary Festival (Harare, Zimbabwe)

So at various times, one or the other of the Monioudis/Grigorcea duo is in the public eye, away a lot on reading tours, while at home in Zurich the other parent keeps family life going. And as if all that wasn't enough work and creative energy, the two have also been running their own publishing house for ten years. "It all started with a blog," they explain. "In our Entre Nous format, we ask writer friends about the creation of their latest book. As soon as we started, we were inundated with review suggestions from publishers – most of which didn't convince us. On the other hand, we knew so many great authors whose books didn't seem to fit anywhere in the publishing program." For example Marc Djizmedijian, Sara Wegmann or Ariela Sarbacher. And: "There were so many forgotten books and authors to rediscover!" Such as the enchanting Fenitschka by early feminist Lou Andreas-Salomé, Hans Fallada's profound tale Die grosse Liebe (The Great Love) or the golden nugget Metropolis by Thea von Harbou, after reading which one wonders why Fritz Lang actually went down in the annals of film history (and the curricula of film and literature studies), while the author of this brilliant material was almost completely forgotten.

Incidentally, Monioudis has long wanted to publish fellow author Grigorcea's thoughts on freedom as an essay with Telegramme Verlag. If only there was time! Perhaps after the Munich Literature Festival...

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