Brotherless Nights
Brotherless Night is an intimate and unforgettable story of a country and a family coming undone. It’s a novel about the early years of the civil war in Sri Lanka.
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Anna von Rath
diversity trainer, translator and editor of poco.lit.
Present-day echoes of telegraphy between Nauen, Kamina and Windhoek
During the era of German colonialism, wireless telegraphy served as an instrument of colonial control. Various aspects of this history and its legacies are addressed in Lene Albrecht’s novel Weiße Flecken (White Spots), in the workbook From Windhoek to Kamina to Nauen, and in the exhibition “Signals of Power” at the Brandenburg Museum in Potsdam.
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The House of Broken Bricks
The House of Broken Bricks is a sad and beautiful story about the cracks in the lives of the Hembrys, a mixed-race family in rural Somerset. It’s a family of four in a difficult situation and it seems like it’s going to break them. But maybe there is still a chance that they can somehow find their way back to each other?
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The Edge of Water
Why are there connections between the well-being of the people in New Orleans and Ibadan? How is the destructive hurricane in one place connected to the drying up river in the other? In Olufunke Grace Bankole’s sad and beautiful debut novel The Edge of Water, this is due to a disregarded prophecy.
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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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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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