Evelyn Juers

Evelyn Juers (b. 6 March 1950) is an Australian writer and publisher.

Juers was born in Neritz, Germany, moved to Australia in 1960, and has lived in Hamburg, Sydney, London and Geneva. She has a PhD from University of Essex, on the Brontës and the practice of biography. As an essayist, and an art and literary critic, she has contributed to a wide range of Australian and international publications. She is co-publisher of the literary magazine HEAT and the Giramondo Publishing company.

House of Exile

Her book House of Exile (2008), subtitled The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann, is a collective biography. It is based on published sources, interviews and extensive archival research in Europe and America. The book won the 2009 Prime Minister's Literary Award in the non-fiction category.

In 1933 the author and political activist Heinrich Mann and his partner Nelly Kroeger fled Nazi Germany, finding refuge first in the south of France and later, in great despair, in Los Angeles, where Nelly committed suicide in 1944 and Heinrich died in 1950. Born into a wealthy middle class family in Lübeck, Heinrich was one of the leading representatives of Weimar culture. Nelly was twenty seven years younger –the adopted daughter of a fisherman, a hostess in a Berlin bar– as far as his family was concerned, she was from the wrong side of the tracks. Their story is crossed by others from their circle, Heinrich's brother Thomas Mann, his sister Carla, friends Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Joseph Roth and Kurt Tucholsky, and beyond them, the writers Egon Kisch and Else Lasker-Schüler, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Virginia Woolf and Nettie Palmer among others. In train compartments, ship's cabins and rented rooms, they called upon what was left to them –their bodies, their minds and if they were lucky, their books– and amidst the debris of an era of self-destruction, built their own annexes to the House of Exile.

External links

• Interview, ABC Radio National
• Mann the elder given a voice, The Australian, 16 November 2008.
• Review of House of Exile, EXBERLINER Magazine
• Interview with Evelyn Juers University of Southern California Libraries, LibWire
• Review of House of Exile, Times Literary Supplement
• Review of House of Exile, The Spectator
• Review of House of Exile, The Observer
• Review of House of Exile
• Review of House of Exile
• Review of House of Exile
• Review of House of Exile
• Review of House of Exile NY Times
• Review of House of Exile
• Review of House of Exile by Geordie Williamson
• Review of House of Exile
• Review of House of Exile, Irish Times
• Review of House of Exile, BBC
• Review of House of Exile, The Guardian