German literature

"Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In the books you will find the name of kings. Did the kings haul up the chunks of rock? There are so many reports and so many questions."

The U.N. Women Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia has launched its new creative writing initiative, which aims to change the way societies think of women's and girls' roles in public by rewriting 28 fairy tales in an event in Istanbul.

The Ianos bookstore will be hosting a discussion with acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Hans Fallada Prize, on Thursday, June 28.

Spyros Payiatakis, a cosmopolitan journalist, long-time theater critic for Kathimerini, foreign correspondent and pioneer of digital reporting, died in Athens on Wednesday.

He was 79 and had been in frail health for several years.

Born in Thessaloniki on April 1, 1939, Payiatakis studied at the city's Anatolia College before leaving to study architecture in Berlin.

The Pallas Theater in Athens presents German icon Ute Lemper in an evening of songs composed by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht on Saturday, February 4, as part of a series of events celebrating the great German playwright.

The Goethe Institute in Athens hosts Greece's first-ever screening of "Baal," a controversial 1970 TV movie based on Bertolt Brecht's play, written and directed for the screen by Volker Schloendorff and starring Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Sigi Graue and Margarethe von Trotta.

As part of the "Idiopolis" exhibition at the State of Concept gallery, which ended on January 14, the Frontviews association presents video art created by some of the participants in the group show, at the Goethe Institute on Thursday, January 19, starting at 8 p.m.

German actress and singer Gisela May has passed away aged 92. May is best known for her performances of political songs by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Born in Wetzlar, Germany, in 1924, May was the daughter of actor and writer Käte May and writer Ferdinand May and attended drama school in Leipzig from 1942 to 1944.

German-Turkish author Feridun Zaimo?lu has been nominated for the Best German-language Novel Award for 2015.

Gunter Grass, the renowned German author and Nobel Prize winner, has died, Deutsche Welle reported.

The 87-year old Grass passed away in Lübeck, northern Germany, on Monday, 13 April 2015.

Grass was born in 1927 in the free city of Danzig, which is now Gdansk in Poland. After the war, he settled in West Germany.