My Pisces Heart
Jennifer Neal always led a very mobile life and in her memoir My Pisces Heart she shares what it was like to live on four different continents as a Black queer woman.
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Anna von Rath
diversity trainer, translator and editor of poco.lit.
Death of the author
Nnedi Okorafor’s newest novel, Death of the Author, is an africanfuturist story about a writer named Zelu, who suddenly becomes world-famous overnight after writing a book about robots and artificial intelligence.
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How we are translated
Jessica Gaitán Johannesson’s debut novel is thought-provoking in its approach to language and culture and offers up a wonderful cast of characters.
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“People are read differently depending on where they are”: A conversation with Raphaëlle Red on the principle of the road novel
Raphaëlle Red is an author currently living in Berlin who writes in French, German and English. She is also doing her PhD on literature in the African diaspora. We had the pleasure of speaking with her about her French-language debut novel Adikou, its protagonist’s journey and its context from one language to the next. The German translation of the novel by Patricia Klobusiczky was published in September 2024 by Rowohlt Verlag.
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Antichristie
I rarely voluntarily choose to read stories about time travel, even though when done well they not only create narrative potential, but also orchestrate and scrutinize connections between the past and present. And this is exactly what Sanyal accomplishes with Antichristie.
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Dispersals
Jessica J. Lee’s third book, Dispersals, On Plants, Borders and Belonging, consists of fourteen personal essays about plants crossing borders and putting down roots in new places. Lee chooses several trees, shrubs and algae, which hold meaning in her own life, to engage with their history and journeys into different parts of the world. In doing so, she questions under what circumstances species are considered either cosmopolitan or invasive.
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Issa
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.
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Author meets translator: a conversation with Sharon Dodua Otoo and Jon Cho Polizzi
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.
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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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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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