ULLA LENZE: THE RADIO OPERATOR

Ulla Lenze in Conversation with William Pierce

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Award-winning German writer Ulla Lenze makes her American debut with The Radio Operator, a taut and engrossing historical novel that draws on a forgotten, but contemporarily relevant, chapter from the past: pro-fascist activity among German immigrants in the U.S. in the years leading up to World War II. Based largely on the true story of Lenze’s great-uncle, the deft narrative—translated by Marshall Yarbrough—bookends the war years as Josef Klein, a German immigrant who arrived in New York in the 1920s, is reluctantly conscripted as an operative for a spy ring of American Nazi sympathizers.

Ulla Lenze has written a highly personal and meditative novel that unfolds against a seemingly familiar backdrop while offering a fresh point-of-view. The Radio Operator is a keenly observed work of fiction that introduces an accomplished literary voice to American readers.

Ulla Lenze was born in Germany in 1973. She studied music and philosophy at the University of Cologne. In 2016, she was awarded the Literature Prize of the Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft for her work. She currently resides in Berlin, where she works as a freelance writer and writing workshop instructor. The Radio Operator is her first novel available in English. She is currently a Max Kade fellow at Dartmouth college.

© privatWilliam Pierce  

William Pierce is coeditor of AGNI. Excerpts from his autofiction manuscript Twenty Sixteen can be found in Harvard Review, The Western Humanities Review, and on the Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub. His short stories have appeared in Granta, Ecotone, American Literary Review, and elsewhere, and other work has appeared in Electric Literature, Little Star, Tin House online, The Writer’s Chronicle, Solstice, Glimmer Train, Consequence, and as part of MacArthur Fellow Anna Schuleit Haber’s art project “The Alphabet,” commissioned by the Fitchburg Art Museum. Pierce is the author of Reality Hunger: On Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Arrowsmith Press, 2016), a monograph first serialized as a three-part essay at The Los Angeles Review of Books. With E. C. Osondu, he coedited The AGNI Portfolio of African Fiction.

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