Lize Spit Is the 54th Samuel Fischer Visiting Professor

Spit will teach a seminar at Freie Universität this summer semester titled “Tell, Don’t Show?! Literature in the Audiovisual Era.” The course explores how novels can be rewritten for film. Students will be introduced to the fundamentals of screenwriting in order to carry out comparative analyses of books and their film adaptations. The seminar will examine specific novels and their screen versions across a range of genres, from classics such as Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999) and the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007) to more recent productions such as Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023) and Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams (2025). Students will also be invited to develop their own creative writing skills through a variety of exercises, for example, by transforming film scenes into literary texts.

A Prominent Voice in Contemporary Flemish Literature

Lize Spit was born in 1988 in Lier and grew up in Belgium. She writes in Flemish. In 2013 her short story “ordehandhaver” won both the jury and audience prizes in the Write Now! competition for emerging Dutch and Flemish authors. She has published literary works in journals such as Tirade, Het liegend konijn, and De Gids. Spit also has a regular column in the daily newspaper De Morgen.

Her debut on the international stage came with the publication of her first novel Het smelt (2016), which became a bestseller in Belgium and the Netherlands. The German translation was published by S. Fischer Verlag publishing house in 2017. The English translation, The Melting, was published in 2021. The novel tells the story of a young woman’s return to her childhood town and the traumatic memories of violence, alcoholism, and familial pressure lingering there. It has been translated into numerous languages and is responsible for launching Spit’s career beyond the borders of Belgium.

Her subsequent novels also deal with broken human relationships. Her second novel, Ik ben er niet (2020, I Am Not There), is a piercing depiction of a crumbling relationship and mental illness. Recent works such as De eerlijke vinder (2023, The Rightful Finder) and Autobiografie van mijn lichaam (2024, Autobiography of My Body) continue in this vein of literary explorations of personal and social boundaries.

Samuel Fischer Visiting Professorship

The Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin has awarded the Samuel Fischer Visiting Professorship for Literature regularly since 1998. It is funded by Freie Universität Berlin, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), S. Fischer Verlag publishing house, and Holtzbrinck Berlin – Inspire Together. Writers from different literary traditions and cultural backgrounds are invited to teach at the Peter Szondi Institute for a semester and engage with students in a critical reflection on literature from around the world. The visiting professors also give public readings and participate in other events around Berlin and in other cities across Germany.