Sommer 24

Reading and discussion with Navid Kermani
Moderation: Insa Wilke

What is it like when the familiar world dissolves, when what was normal yesterday no longer applies today? Navid Kermani captures this moment in a single summer: a friend who had recently gone astray politically has taken his own life. The wars are getting closer and the debates are getting shriller. His girlfriend thinks the narrator is a macho man, but this is by no means the worst accusation that shatters his self-image. In an inimitable way, Navid Kermani succeeds in understanding our present from its contradictions, reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable and enduring the truly irreconcilable. Navid Kermani, born in Siegen in 1967, lives as a freelance writer in Cologne. He has received numerous awards, including the Kleist Prize, the Joseph Breitbach Prize, the Hölderlin Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and the Thomas Mann Prize for his novel "Das Alphabet bis S".