This conversation brings together three writers whose work emerges from interruption, displacement, and lives lived between different places, languages, and political realities. Jina Khayyer, Widad Nabi, and Elnathan John reflect on what it means to write when the future is uncertain and one’s sense of belonging remains provisional. Each of them approaches this condition from a different horizon: Khayyer’s work moves between memory, inheritance, and political awakening, most vividly in her novel Im Herzen der Katze [In the heart of the cat] (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2025), where personal history folds into the 2022 protests in Iran and the lives of women shaped by exile and resistance. Nabi writes from the lived experience of Syrian exile; in collections like Unsischtbare Brüche [Invisible fractures] (Sujet Verlag, 2022) and Kurz vor dreißig ... küss mich [Kiss me ... just before thirty] (Sujet Verlag, 2019, her poetry gathers fragments of war, language, and displacement into a voice that persists despite rupture. John’s work draws on contemporary Nigeria, moving between fiction and satire. His novel Born on a Tuesday (Grove Atlantic, 2016) traces a life shaped by religious and political violence, while Be(com)ing Nigerian (Durnell Central, 2019) exposes the absurdities and contradictions of everyday life with sharp, unsettling humour.