Abbas Khider knows all about repression, flight and expulsion, homelessness and hopes for a new life. The German-Iraqi writer, who has written in German from the beginning, tells tragicomic, harrowing and touching stories of people who have to suffer persecution and expulsion in a musical and slender language, according to the jury of the Mainzer Stadtschreiberpreis. With sensitivity, humour and sympathy, he gives the homeless an authentic, unmistakable voice.
In 2016,
His current novel "Ohrfeige" was published. Khider depicts with a sense of melancholy and the grotesque how a group of asylum seekers in the early 2000s get caught in the wheels of an absurd German bureaucracy. Marianne Grosse, head of the department of culture, on Khider's choice: "Abbas Khider just delivers with his much-discussed book 'Ohrfeige' a completely different statement to the diverse accounts of the refugee movements that have long moved Europe and especially Germany. In this case, however, from the point of view of those affected, who often do not seem to be granted to finally arrive after inconceivable ways and efforts."
(Admission is one hour before the start of the event)
Text source and further information about this event can be found at: http://www.frankfurter-hof-mainz.de/programm-tickets/
