Look forward to a magical evening with the Berlin-based author, who will be reading from his book *Amarek: Fairy Tales for Grown-Up Children and Childish Adults*.
Gabriel Wolkenfeld, born and raised in Berlin in 1985, studied German, Russian, and general and comparative literature in Potsdam. Extended periods of study and work took him to Estonia, Russia, Ukraine, and Israel.
He organized Ukrainian-German youth exchanges.
He works as a freelance teacher of German as a foreign language. He regularly offers writing workshops for native German speakers and people learning German as a foreign language, including on behalf of Berlin’s adult education centers.
As a writer, Gabriel Wolkenfeld has been publishing prose and poetry since 2013. His first novel, *Wir Propagandisten*, was published in 2015. Since then, he has been nominated for several awards and has won competitions. In 2021, he was awarded the Hanns-Meinke Prize for Young Poetry; in 2022, he received the Ulrich-Grasnick Poetry Prize as well as the “writer in residence” literary fellowship in Gelsenkirchen.
Since 2025, Gabriel Wolkenfeld has been a “Kurd-Laßwitz Fellow” of the royal seat of Gotha, where he works as the city’s writer-in-residence.
The twelve texts collected in *Amarek* ( 2026), though inspired by the treasure trove of German-language, Slavic, and Jewish fairy tales, are not adaptations but rather the author’s own original creations. The individual fairy tales in this volume are set in a fictional kingdom long before our time and address timeless yet highly topical themes. Amarek—which, according to legend, was created by a slightly tipsy deity in two sets of seven days—is ruled with an iron fist by a king who scurries through his castle on legs that are far too short. The legs of the mendacious tales produced by his town clerk are also proverbially short. And the rest of the cast isn’t what it used to be either: the executioner’s son suddenly quits his job—killing isn’t in his nature—and then Death himself realizes he’s exhausted and needs rest, so he refuses to let people die....