Feridun Zaimoglu

Feridun Zaimoglu in June 2023 on the occasion of the GPP film shoot in Kassel

- Stefanie Kreuzer | As of Oct. 2023 -

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

The Turkish-born author became known with Kanak Sprak (1995). The text plays with documentary and fictional facets and illuminates in 24 monologues by migrants the question of how it is to live as a 'Kanake' in Germany.

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

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