represented by
agent: Thérèse Coen
theatre
recently directed
coming up
about
Christine Lehnen has been writing fiction her entire life. She has been been teaching creative writing at the University of Bonn since 2014. Her short stories have been awarded the prizes of the Young Academies of Europe and the Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen.
She has written for German and French newspapers and outlets such as Le Taurillon and the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger and has been a judge of the Young Literature Award of her hometown Recklinghausen since 2015. Christine has lived in Canada, the United States, Australia, and Paris, and is now based in Bonn where she writes, teaches, researches fiction and spends her free time directing theatre plays and obsessing over twitter as well as the fate of the European Union. While finishing up two postgraduate degrees, one in Political Sciences and one in English Literatures and Cultures, she advocates for a federal Europe as well as a European prize for literature and a mentoring programme to help young writers without industry connections, especially from a working class background.
Her social fantasy and sci fi fiction is published under the pen name C. E. Bernard, most recently the PALACE OF GLASS trilogy (Blanvalet, 2018).
news
Directing: FANCIES
Ina Habermann and I have the great honour of directing the BUSC’s contribution to the FEATS Festival 2018 in Antwerp: a new play by Ellie Lewerenz called FANCIES. Fifty minutes about what it costs to stay in a relationship today – witty and funny, until it isn’t.
research and teaching
publications
teaching:
The Novel Writing Workshop at the University of Bonn, first taught in 2014, is open to students from all disciplines. After a special application process, students may spend several semesters working on their novels, cover every stage from the first idea over outlining, writing the first draft, editing and polishing to submitting. The workshop focuses especially on a combination of theory and application, with particular emphasis on the craft of storytelling and the latest findings of narratology, a functional approach to fiction proposed by researchers such as Keith Oatley, Raymond A. Mar, or Melanie Greene. The students work on projects that represent all the variety of young contemporary fiction in the region, from genre fiction over accessible literary to innovative language experiments. Every semester, students’ work is showcased to editors and agents, e. g. from DuMont, Kiepenheuer & Witsch and Bastei Lübbe.
Student Reading Recs:
Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With A Thousand Faces.
Fludernik, Monika. Towards a New Narratolgy.
Frey, James N. How to Write a Damn Good Novel.
Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction.
George, Elizabeth. Write Away. One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction.
Gottschall, Jonathan. The Story-Telling Animal. How Fiction Makes Us Human
Kehlmann, Daniel. Diese Sehr Ernsten Scherze.
Lehnen, Christine. “Exploring Narratives’ Powers of Emotional Persuasion through Character Involvement: A Working Heuristic”.
Oatley, Keith. The Passionate Muse. Exploring Emotions in Fiction.
Researchers at OnFiction.ca about the science of fiction
Rob Morgan at https://gamestoryuk.tumblr.com/ about digital storytelling
Sacks, Oliver. Gratitude.
Samantha Shannon at samantha-shannon.blogspot.com about the English-speaking publishing world
Sklar, Howard. The Art of Sympathy in Fiction.
Vogler, Christoph. The Writer’s Journey. Mythic Structure for Writers.
Zeh, Juli. Treideln.