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Start giftingMemoirs of a Polar Bear
Translator
Susan Bernofsky
Length
8 hours 52 minutes
Language
English
Narrators
Paul Woodson & Christa Lewis
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreMemoirs of a Polar Bear has in spades what Rivka Galchen hailed in the New Yorker as "Yoko Tawada's magnificent strangeness"—Tawada is an author like no other. Three generations (grandmother, mother, son) of polar bears are famous as both circus performers and writers in East Germany: they are polar bears who move in human society, stars of the ring and of the literary world. In chapter one, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography. In chapter two, Tosca, her daughter (born in Canada, where her mother had emigrated) moves to the DDR and takes a job in the circus. Her son—the last of their line—is Knut, born in chapter three in a Leipzig zoo but raised by a human keeper in relatively happy circumstances in the Berlin zoo, until his keeper, Matthias, is taken away . . .
Happy or sad, each bear writes a story, enjoying both celebrity and "the intimacy of being alone with my pen."
Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then moved again to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has received the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Goethe Medal.
Paul Woodson has won SOVAS and AudioFile Earphones Awards, and has recorded close to 350 audiobooks in many different genres-including romance, fiction, history, biography, and mystery-and received his BFA in acting from Boston University. In his theater days, he worked in many NYC shows, toured the USA and Europe, and played the title role as Vincent van Gogh in the sung-through, OOBR Award-winning musical Vincent. He enjoys backpacking the Appalachian Trail and visiting National Parks in his spare time. He is a member of SAG-AFTRA.
Christa Lewis and her pseudonym Pippa Jayne have narrated 265 audiobooks between them. Christa is a conservatory trained actor with a smart and funny vibe who can also meet the moment in nonfiction thanks to a seventeen-year stint as a newsreader. Christa speaks accent-free German fluently and offers a variety of accents and dialects. Magically, there have been eight AudioFile Earphones Awards in nonfiction/biography and memoir, YA, and fiction-as well as a SOVAS Voice Arts Award, a Sultry Listeners Award, a Listeners Choice Award, and two Audie nominations.