Rude Girl

Birgit Weyhe was born in Munich in 1969. She spent her childhood in Uganda and Kenya and studied literature and history in Konstanz and Hamburg. Going on to study illustration, she has since worked as an illustrator and comic artist in Hamburg. Her graphic novels have been nominated for awards in Germany, France and Japan, and Madgermanes received the 2015 Comic Book Prize of the Berthold Leibinger Foundation and the 2016 Max and Moritz Prize for best German comic. In 2022 she was awarded Hamburg’s prestigious Lessing Grant and was honoured as best German-language comic artist. Rude Girl was shortlisted for the Hamburg Book of the Year award and was the first comic ever to be nominated for the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair, in 2023.

Priscilla Layne was born in Evanston, IL in 1981 and spent her childhood and early adulthood in Chicago. She studied comparative literature at the University of Chicago and received her PhD in German from the University of California at Berkeley. She is now Professor of German and Adjunct Associate Professor of African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book, White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture, was published in 2018 by the University of Michigan Press. She has also published essays on Turkish German culture, translation, punk and film. She recently translated Olivia Wenzel's debut novel, "1000 Coils of Fear", from German into English. And she is currently finishing a manuscript on Afro German Afrofuturism and acritical guide to Rainer Maria Fassbinder's film The Marriage of Maria Braun.

"Birgit Weyhe develops a rhythm of empathy in her comic. She tells the story of Crystal and her immigrant family like a rap. Six pictures per page, that's the beat." Die Zeit "Full of violence, pain, suffering and rebellion and a long way from what you'd expect of an academic career." taz "Alongside the stark visual force that Rude Girl develops, what marks it out is its montage construction: in a second narrative layer, Weyhe presents the US professor Priscilla Layne with sections of her own drawn biography. The result is a productive and extremely open dialogue between two cooperating narrators: on cultural appropriation, race and gender. An essential contribution to our current identity debates." Jury statement, Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair

“Birgit Weyhe develops a rhythm of empathy in her comic. She tells the story of Crystal and her immigrant family like a rap. Six pictures per page, that’s the beat.”
Die Zeit

“Full of violence, pain, suffering and rebellion and a long way from what you’d expect of an academic career.”
taz

“Alongside the stark visual force that Rude Girl develops, what marks it out is its montage construction: in a second narrative layer, Weyhe presents the US professor Priscilla Layne with sections of her own drawn biography. The result is a productive and extremely open dialogue between two cooperating narrators: on cultural appropriation, race and gender. An essential contribution to our current identity debates.”
Jury statement, Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair