Geile Deko
Isabel Waidner | Ann Cotten
Jury’s comment
Isabel Waidner’s Geile Deko (Gaudy Bauble) is a sparkling and flickering attack on all the synapses; a fortunately failed Netflix series with the glitches, flashes and hisses of a VHS tape that’s been copied over one too many times. The great news this book conveys is that the underground is not only alive, but it’s savoring its life, queer, trans and as gender-fluid as language can be. This book will be over the heads of all gender studies haters. It shows how political the pleasure of wordplay is. And Ann Cotton’s laid-back translation with her daring word inventions is enviably good.
— Robin Detje, jury
Author: Isabel Waidner
Isabel Waidner is a writer and critical theorist. Their latest novel We Are Made of Diamond Stuff was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2019 and the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2020. Gaudy Bauble (Geile Deko) was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2018. Waidner’s writing has appeared in journals including AQNB, The Happy Hypocrite, Frieze and Tripwire. They are a co-founder of Queers Read This at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and an academic at Roehampton University, London.
Translator: Ann Cotten
Ann Cotten is an author, translator and literary theorist living in Vienna and Berlin. She completed her studies of German in 2006 with a thesis under Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler. Since then, she has published numerous volumes of poetry and short stories (including Fremdwörterbuchsonette, Der schaudernde Fächer, Fast Dumm. Essays von on the Road), as well as a novel (Lyophilia, 2019). Ann Cotten has received numerous prizes for her writing, most recently the Klopstock Prize and the Hugo Ball Prize. In 2018 she was admitted to the Berlin Academy of the Arts.