Feridun Zaimoglu

Feridun Zaimoglu was in Kassel several times in 2023 - for preliminary talks, his inaugural lecture, poetry seminar and reading, for filming and the premiere of UND ICH WAR FERIDUN ZAIMOGLU (D 2023; director: Thomas Köhler)

- Stefanie Kreuzer | As at: Oct. 2023 -

Feridun Zaimoglu was honored as Grimm Poetics Professor at the University of Kassel in 2023.

The Turkish-born author became famous with Kanak Sprak (1995). The text plays with documentary and fictional facets and uses 24 monologues by migrants to shed light on the question of what life is like as a 'Kanake' in Germany.

Zaimoglu is an extremely prolific and linguistically diverse author who has published over a dozen novels of different genres by 2022. The crime comedy Leinwand (2003), for example, is set in an artistic milieu. Leyla (2006) tells the story of the titular child protagonist, who grows up in Anatolia in violent patriarchal circumstances and, as a young mother, follows her husband to Germany as a migrant worker. Liebesbrand (2008) is about a largely unfulfilled love story following a serious bus accident. In the historical novel Evangelio (2017), Zaimgolu tells the story of Martin Luther as a bird freedman before his Bible translation at Wartburg Castle from the perspective of the lansquenet guarding him. Finally, Bewältigung (2022) is a fictionalized approach to Adolf Hitler from the perspective of a fictional author character.

Zaimoglu has also published several volumes of short stories, including Kopf und Kragen (2001), Zwölf Gramm Glück (2004) and Ich gehe durch das Deutschland meiner Tage (2018). He has also co-written plays with Günter Senkel for German and Austrian theaters in Frankfurt, Bremen, Kiel, Munich, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Salzburg and Worms.