Reading and Conversation

Special Guest: Assia Djebar with Navid Kermani and Terézia Mora

The Literary Salon - International

Tue, Sep 15, 2009
8 pm
Admission: 8 € / 6 €
Assia Djebar, By courtesy of Unionverlag

The Literary Salon starts with Assia Djebar, who is undoubtedly Algeria’s best-known contemporary woman writer. In the world in which she immerses her readers in her latest very personal book, "Nowhere in the House of my Father", she vividly illustrates the great conflicts within Arabian modernity through the fates of individuals without once losing sight of the true complexity of her enlightening theses. Using the “clear, fragile power of language”, she sounds out the fields of tension in which young Fatima seeks to find her own path between the strict views of her Algerian father and the European lifestyle of her mother.

The German texts will be read by Julia Jäger.

Assia Djebar (born in Algeria in 1936) is a novelist, historian and film-maker, and the most important woman author in the Maghreb. She lives and teaches in Paris and New York. In 1996, she was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and, in the year 2000, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She has been a member of the Académie française since 2005. Her books have been translated into fifteen languages.

More information about Assia Djebar on international literature festival berlin

A co-operation project, conceived by Guy Helminger, Navid Kermani and Terézia Mora, between the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Cologne Literature House and the Stadtgarten, Cologne.