The German Embassy Dublin, the Irish Writers Centre, and the corridor cordially invite you to:

Heimat? German writers in Ireland

Friday, February 7th, 2020, 7pm
Residency of the German Ambassador
Nutley Road, Donnybrook, Co Dublin

The event is free of charge. Please RSVP at rsvp@dubl.diplo.de by 31 January.

What does it mean to be a a migrant and write and work in a language that is not your mother tongue? Join Susanne Stich and Marcel Krueger, two German writers working in English, for a reading and public discussion at the Residence of the German Embassy in Donnybrook. Both writers will read from their work and will be joined by the director of the Irish Writers Centre, Valerie Bistany, and the German Ambassador to Ireland, H.E. Deike Potzel, to talk about German-Irish relations in literature and elsewhere, cross-border collaboration, about identity and the concept of Heimat.

As part of the panel, Tom Muckian of Dundalk’s only independent bookshop Roe River Books will introduce a selection of his favourite German-Irish books on the night as well

Susanne Stich is originally from Nürnberg and lives in the Northwest of Ireland. She was a finalist at the Irish Novel Fair 2018 and recently received a bursary award from the Irish Arts Council. Her writing appeared in The Stinging Fly, Ambit, Boyne Berries, The Incubator and many other magazines. She has worked in the arts and educational sector as a lecturer, curator and facilitator for many years, and is currently Literary Guide for the Reading Rooms programme at Verbal Arts Centre, Derry. She holds an MA in English Literature and Film Studies from Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen, and a PhD from Ulster University, Belfast looking into ‘Visibilities of Childhood in Moving Image’.
susannestich.com

Marcel Krueger is a German writer living in Dundalk in Ireland who writes about places, history and the journeys in between. His articles and essays have been published in the Irish Times, The Guardian, Daily Telegraph and CNN Travel, amongst others. Marcel also works as the Books Editor of Elsewhere – A Journal of Place and is the co-founder of the corridor, an interdisciplinary arts project that engages with borders and their consequences. In 2019, he was chosen as the official writer-in-residence of Olsztyn in Poland by the German Culture Forum for Central and Eastern Europe. His latest book ‘Babushka’s Journey – The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps’ (I.B. Tauris, 2018, published in German as ‘Von Ostpreussen in den Gulag’ in 2019 by Reclam) explores the wartime experiences of his grandmother and her journey to Russia in 1945 through a travel memoir.
kingofpain.org

Founded in 1991, the Irish Writers Centre is the national resource centre for Irish literature. Their mission is to support, promote and inform writers at all stages of their development, offering creative writing courses, professional training, information, networking opportunities, and regular events. A successful part of the IWC’s community programme are the Writers-in-Residence: a community engaged residency model, where writers act as facilitators working with marginalised or special interest groups. Other projects include Young Writer Delegates, where young writershave the opportunity to immerse themselves in a literature festival, and the cross-border initiative Xborders, a literary collaborative intervention bringing emerging writers together to explore and write about borders through fiction or nonfiction.
irishwriterscentre.ie

Photo: Haus der Statistik at Alexanderplatz, Berlin. Photo by Kader Celep via Unsplash.