Helga Königsdorf (13 July 1938 – 4 May 2014) was an East German author and physicist.

Life

She was born in

Gera Gera is a city in the German state of Thuringia. With around 93,000 inhabitants, it is the third-largest city in Thuringia after Erfurt and Jena as well as the easternmost city of the ''Thüringer Städtekette'', an almost straight string of cit ...

, a farmer's daughter. She went into academia and was appointed to the East Berlin Academy of Sciences of the GDR from 1961 to 1990. Since 1974, she headed the Department of Probability and Mathematical Statistics. At age 40, she published her first short-story collection ''Meine ungehörigen Träume'' ("My Indecent Dreams"). Her writing peers included

Christa Wolf Christa Wolf (; née Ihlenfeld; 18 March 1929 – 1 December 2011) was a German novelist and essayist.
Barbara Gard ...

Brigitte Reimann Brigitte Reimann (born 21 July 1933, Burg bei Magdeburg, d. 22 February 1973, East Berlin) was a German writer who is best known for her posthumously published novel ''Franziska Linkerhand''. Life Brigitte Reimann was the daughter of Willi Rei ...

and Maxie Wander, who worked on woman's rights issues in the GDR in the 70s and 80s. In 1990 she left academia to devote herself to writing full-time. Helga lived with Parkinson's disease for more than 30 years.

Awards

*1985

Heinrich Mann Prize The Heinrich Mann Prize () is an essay prize that has been awarded since 1953, first by the East German Academy of Arts, then by the Academy of Arts, Berlin. The prize, which comes with a €10,000 purse, is given annually on 27 March, Heinrich Ma ...

*1992

Roswitha Prize The Roswitha Prize (german: Roswitha-Preis) is the oldest German language prize for literature that is given solely to women. The Roswitha-Medal has been given almost yearly since 1973 by the city of Bad Gandersheim. In 1998 it received its moder ...

Works

Fiction

*''Meine ungehörigen Träume'' (short stories, 1978), Aufbau-Verlag *''Der Lauf der Dinge'' (short stories, 1982), Aufbau-Verlag *''Respektloser Umgang'' (short stories, 1986), Aufbau-Verlag *''Lichtverhältnisse'' (short stories, 1988), Aufbau-Verlag *''Ungelegener Befund'' (short stories, 1990), Aufbau-Verlag *''Adieu DDR'' (memoir, 1990) *''Gleich neben Afrika'' (short stories, 1992), Rowohlt Berlin Verlag *''Im Schatten des Regenbogens'' (novel, 1993), Aufbau-Verlag *''Über die unverzügliche Rettung der Welt'' (essays, 1994), Aufbau-Verlag *''Die Entsorgung der Großmutter'' (novel, 1997), Aufbau-Verlag *''Landschaft in wechselndem Licht'' (memoir, 2002), Aufbau-Verlag

Math

*Helga Bunke: ''Gewöhnliche Differentialgleichungen mit zufälligen Parametern''. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1972. *Olaf Bunke, Helga Bunke (Hrsg.): ''Statistical methods of model building''. Berlin 1986. *Olaf Bunke, Helga Bunke (Hrsg.): ''Nonlinear regression, functional relations and robust methods''. 2 Bände, New York 1989.

English translations

Few of her fiction works have been translated into English. ''Fission'' was published by

Northwestern University Press Northwestern University Press is an American publishing house affiliated with Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. It publishes 70 new titles each year in the areas of continental philosophy, poetry, Slavic and German literary criticism ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Konigsdorf, Helga 1938 births 2014 deaths People from Gera People from East Berlin German women writers East German writers East German women 20th-century German women