In Case of Loss gathers the best of Lutz Seiler’s non-fiction from the last twenty-five years, revealing his essays to be different to, but on a par with, his much-praised fiction and poetry. Seiler’s beautifully anecdotal and associative pieces throw fascinating light on literature and his background, not least the environmental and human catastrophe of the Soviet-era mining in the community he grew up in, ‘the tired villages . . . beneath which lay the ore, uranium.’ Other essays focus on poetry, including his discovery of poetry during his military service and pieces on German poets, including Ernst Meister, Jürgen Becker and Peter Huchel, whose former house, outside Berlin, is now home to Lutz Seiler. Meanwhile, the title essay – a fascinating insight into a poet’s creative process – describes Huchel’s notebook, a kind of dictionary of poetic images organised by mood and location.

In Martyn Crucefix’s fine translations, this volume provides a perfect introduction to Seiler’s work as a whole (here is The Poetry Foundation’s 2024 entry for Seiler’s whole oeuvre). In Case of Loss sees one of Europe’s most original writers speaking with openness and clarity in essays full of insight, humanity and a poet’s attention to the importance of often overlooked objects and lives.

In 2023, Lutz Seiler was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize by the German Academy of Language and Literature. Past recipients of this prize include Max Frisch, Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann – basically most of the other key German writers you can think of. The 2023 jury said:  ‘With Lutz Seiler, the German Academy for Language and Literature honours an author who began his career with melodious volumes of poetry and then found his way to storytelling, but he always remained a lyricist as clear as he is enigmatic, darkly luminous…His essays and lectures on poetry, on the other hand, bear witness to his argumentative precision. Lutz Seiler spent his years of apprenticeship in Thuringia, and this background has a profound influence on his narrative work in particular…As a novelist and as a poet, Lutz Seiler has found his own distinctive voice, melancholic, urgent, sincere, full of the wonderful echoes of a long literary tradition.’

Alongside the engaging narrative essays contained in In Case of Loss, the publisher, And Other Stories, has brought two further complimentary facets of Lutz Seiler’s humane, earthy writing to English-speaking readers with translations of his most recent novel (Star 111) and his poetry (Pitch & Glint), all published in late 2023.