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Issa, who lives in Frankfurt am Main, is pregnant and desperate. The situation with her child’s father is complicated as is with her mother. No longer knowing what to do, and at the urging of her mother, she flies to see her grandmother and great-grandmother in Cameroon.
more...On 07 March 2024, we held our Author Meets Translator event with Sharon Dodua Otoo and Jon Cho Polizzi. Together we talked about the novel Adas Raum (Ada’s Room/Ada’s Realm), narrative perspectives, dialect and humour.
more...Lena Albrecht’s novel Weiße Flecken (‘White Spots’ in English) is an excellent example of a critical examination of one’s own whiteness. The novel shows how a young white woman gets the impetus to question the typical narration of German history, takes her newly acquired perspective personally and deals with the entanglements of her own family.
more...In Max Lobe‘s novel Vertraulichkeiten (Confidentialities, not yet translated into English), a nameless first-person narrator who lives in Switzerland travels to Cameroon, where he grew up, and in a village somewhere on the road between Duala and Jaunde, an old woman tells him about the Cameroonian struggle for independence.
more...In the novel Messer, Zungen (Knives, Tongues, not yet translated into English) Simoné Goldschmidt-Lechner approaches the story of a South African family that later moves to Germany in an experimental, fragmentary manner.
more...In Rowohlt Verlag’s newly launched series, rororo Entdeckungen, Magda Birkmann and Nicole Seifert select novels by remarkable but forgotten female authors from the twentieth century for publication. Last week we had the pleasure of talking to Magda Birkmann about this series and the novel Daddy was a number runner (Eine Tochter Harlems) by Louise Meriwether.
more...Four years after its first publication, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s award-winning debut novel House of Stone has now been published by Interkontinental Verlag in the German translation of Simone Jakob. The weighty subject Tshuma chose for House of Stone is the Gukurahundi, the genocide in Zimbabwe that took place in the 1980s under Prime Minister Robert […]
more...As readers of Moshtari Hilal’s book, we are allowed to accompany the sometimes painful process of coming to terms with what is constructed as ugly, in order to realize that ugliness is actually what is behind this construction.
more...Marchelle Farrell’s Nature Memoir Uprooting – From the Caribbean to the Countryside is an emotional search for a place to put down roots. She didn’t expect this place to be a small village in Somerset.
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