Sponsored by the Center for European Studies.
RONYA OTHMANN is a poet and author from Germany. She has received many prizes for her work including the Caroline Schlegel Prize for essay writing, the Open Mike poetry prize, the Gertrud Kolmar Prize and the Audience Award of the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition. In 2020, Hanser published her novel,
“Die Sommer” for which she was awarded the Mara Cassens Prize. The novel was translated into English and published by the UW Press in 2023. (trans. Gary Schmidt).
“Die Sommer” is a novel filled with tenderness and anger at a world torn in two. Leyla’s parents are German and Yazidi. She spends lesson time sitting in her secondary school in Munich, and the summer holidays sitting on the earthy floor of her grandparents’ house in a Yazidi village. Leyla is familiar with the outline of Kurdistan, and the shape of the female student she loves. She clicks through pictures of war-torn Aleppo the assassination of the Yazidi by ISIS, and alongside these, carefree photos of her German friends’ everyday lives. Leyla will soon have to make a decision.
*Othmann will read IN GERMAN from Die Sommer (translations into English from The Summers will be made available) and selected poems from her poetry collection Die Verbrechen (Hanser, 2021), which will be translated into English by Jon Cho-Polizzi who will be present to read the English version.