Literary Solidarity
Perspectives on a New Literary Landscape

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Heike Geißler © Cihan Çakmak

Hatice Açıkgöz © Cihan Çakmak

Please note that the event will be held in German.

“It’s actually always the same despair,” writes Hatice Açıkgöz in the foreword to the anthology Literarisch Solidarisch – Perspektiven auf einen neuen Literaturbetrieb (Verbrecher Verlag, 2026): “It’s always about whether the project is mainstream enough to be published by a major commercial publisher. Almost always, the answer is: no.”

Out of this impulse of despair, Hatice Açıkgöz launched the podcast literarisch solidarisch in 2023 together with Dara Brexendorf and Zara Zerbe. The anthology she edited under the same title now brings together seventeen authors who examine the literary world from various marginalized positions. Three of them will be guests at Haus für Poesie this evening.

Dara Brexendorf (born 1991 in Kiel) is a freelance writer and literary educator. Her debut novel Paradise Beach will be published in spring 2026 by Eichborn Verlag. In her anthology contribution Meine Utopie des leisen Raums im lauten, she writes about mental health and writing, defending the quiet space of writing against the loud hammering of depression and the competitive mentality of the literary world: “I want to read texts by people in their quiet spaces, and I want to write texts in my quiet space and let them out into the world.”

Özlem Özgül Dündar (born 1983 in Solingen) is an author and translator. Her poetry debut gedanken zerren appeared in 2018 from ELIF VERLAG. In her piece Welcome to the Oscars, she writes about the “uncanny homeland,” the German obsession with ancestry, and exclusion within the German literary scene, countering it with a fluidity of culture, language, and society: “That is why the struggle over language is so essential. Whoever is linguistically present actually exists; they cannot easily be talked away or thought out of existence.”

Heike Geißler (born 1977 in Riesa) is a translator and author of numerous novels and essays, most recently Arbeiten (Hanser Berlin 2025) and Verzweiflungen (Suhrkamp Verlag 2025). In her anthology contribution, under the Puhdys quote title Zwischen Himmel und Erde zu sein, she reflects on aging in the literary world, an ever-sharper bullshit radar against the market pressures and vanities of the industry, and the hope for “understanding for one another, the desire to listen to each other, and also to understand why and how someone is rooted in a time and is the way they are.”

In reading & conversation Dara Brexendorf, Özlem Özgül Dündar, Heike Geißler
Moderation Hatice Açıkgöz