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Anna von Rath

diversity trainer, translator and editor of poco.lit.

Lene Albrecht
White Spots

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.

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Max Lobe
Vertraulichkeiten (Confidentialities)

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.

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“Women have always written”: An interview with Magda Birkmann

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.

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Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
House of Stone

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 […]

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Moshtari Hilal
Hässlichkeit (Ugliness)

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.

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Louis Chude-Sokei
Race and Technology

Chude-Sokei explores the historical connections between race and technology. He looks back to the time of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people and works his way through various historical stages to current issues surrounding artificial intelligence.

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