Himmelwärts

"Do you copy?" crackles from the homemade space radio that Toni and her friend Yum-Yum have set up in the garden one night. "This is Delta Papa Zero India Sierra Sierra. Over." That doesn't sound like Toni's mum at all. But reaching her mum was exactly the point - her mum who died not long ago. The two girls wonder whether she might still be out there somewhere, in the starry sky, somewhere in the dark night. Energy can't just disappear, says Yum-Yum, who knows about these things. So Toni puts all her hope into the radio that night - and it suddenly answers! Only it's not her mum: it's Zanna, an astronaut aboard the distant space station ISS. Toni and Yum-Yum can hardly believe it, and they ask Zanna everything they've ever wanted to know: about weightlessness, planets and stars, and eventually about death - but above all about life.

Author Karen Köhler was born in Hamburg, once wanted to be a cosmonaut, learned to skydive, and studied acting. She now writes plays, radio dramas, screenplays and prose. Her widely praised short-story collection "Wir haben Raketen geangelt" appeared in 2014, followed by her novel "Miroloi" in 2019. In 2024 she published "Himmelwärts" - originally written as a stage play - as her first children's novel. The book won the Luchs literary prize in February 2024.