Reading and Conversation: Return to Syria
“Assad is gone. The regime has fallen. The regime from which my father—a stateless Yazidi Kurd—fled Syria in 1980. I know the country from visiting my grandparents when I was a child. A country where the portrait of the dictator and his father hung on every corner, a country ruled by a family like a mafia clan. For 54 years.”
Image gallery
RONYA OTHMANN
A few weeks after the fall of Assad, Ronya Othmann traveled to Syria with her father: on the trail of recent events, through a country that seems to have become a stranger to itself. And everywhere she traveled, she spoke to people of all backgrounds—people who, between fear and hope, once again want to believe in the future.
Ronya Othmann, born in Munich in 1993 to a German mother and a Kurdish-Yazidi father, writes poetry, prose, and essays and works as a journalist. She has received many awards, including the Open Mike Poetry Prize, the MDR Literature Prize, and the Caroline Schlegel Prize for Essay Writing. She won the Mara Cassens Prize for her first novel, Die Sommer, in 2020 and the Orphil Debut Prize, the Horst Bienek Prize, and the Horst Bingel Prize for her poetry collection die verbrechen in 2022.
Her second novel, Vierundsiebzig, was nominated for the German Book Prize and honored with the Düsseldorf Literature Prize, the 2024 SWR Shortlist Prize, and the 2025 Erich Loest Prize.
Presented in German
With a musical contribution by students of the Barenboim-Said Akademie
Additional information
Participating artists
Ronya Othmann
Prof. Dr. Kai Wiegandt
Dates
October 2025
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