Words in Exile

25.06.2025 / 19:00 – 21:00
With Hanadi Zarka, Karima Shabrang

Reading and talk
Moderated by Vanessa Vu

How does life far from home influence one’s own language? What experiences find expression in poetry? Three former scholarship holders of the ICORN program will read poems and texts written during their stay in Berlin and Hanover.

Karima Shabrang was persecuted in Afghanistan for her open treatment of eroticism and female desire in her poems and found refuge with her family in Berlin in 2022. This year, the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program published a selection of her poems in the volume Ich atmete Erde, sprach Regen (I breathed earth, spoke rain) in Persian and German translation.

The Syrian poet, journalist and writer Hanadi Zarka regularly publishes articles in Arabic-language media. Since this year, she has been working on a project on history written by women for “Weiter Schreiben”. In 2025, her bilingual Arabic-German poetry collection Wie ein Herz am Hauseingang (Like a Heart at the House Entrance) was published by the Artists-in-Berlin Program, in which she deals with the state of exile, loneliness, homesickness and Berlin.

Atefe Asadi is an author, editor, translator and songwriter from Tehran. Her writing deals with Iranian society, including gender issues, sexuality and women’s rights. In December 2022, Atefe Asadi received the Hannah Arendt Fellowship and has been living in Hanover as an ICORN resident ever since. Some of her short stories are available in German translation from “Weiter Schreiben”.

German journalist Vanessa Vu is the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants. The family spent their first years in Germany in a home for asylum seekers in Lower Bavaria. She has been writing about racism, discrimination and gender issues, among other things, as an editor at Zeit Online since 2017.

daadgalerie, Oranienstraße 161, 10969 Berlin
With simultaneous translation German / Arabic / Persian
Admission free

In cooperation with Literaturhaus Hannover