Literatures in Exile: Vanessa Vu and Ahmad Katlesh

The Syrian writer Ahmad Katlesh, who came to Germany in 2016, and the journalist Vanessa Vu, who lived in a home for asylum seekers in Lower Bavaria for several years as the child of Vietnamese guest workers, met while tangoing. They wrote emails to each other for over two years to learn to understand each other better - he in Arabic, she in German. 

Their joint essay “Komm dahin, wo es still ist. An exploration” will be presented by Ahmad Katlesh and Vanessa Vu in a multimedia performance as part of the ‘Literature in Exile’ series. It is the personal story of two lovers, about ghosts and borders, internet cafés and misunderstandings, and about what it means when the political repeatedly breaks into the private sphere. 

Vanessa Vu is a journalist. She was born in Eggenfelden in 1991 and spent her childhood in a home for asylum seekers in Pfarrkirchen. She has been working as an editor at ZEIT ONLINE since 2017. In reports, essays and analyses, she focuses on issues relating to migration, racism and social justice. She also hosts a monthly discussion series on poverty and classism at the Schaubühne Berlin. From 2018-2023, she co-hosted the vietdeutsche podcast Rice and Shine. She has been awarded the Theodor Wolff Prize, the Helmut Schmidt Prize and the Lessing Prize for Criticism, among others, for her work.

Ahmad Katlesh is a writer. He was born in Damascus in 1988 and studied mathematics there. After the Syrian revolution, he fled to Jordan in 2013 and worked there as a journalist. He came to Germany in 2016 with a scholarship from the Heinrich Böll House. He has published three books of short stories and poems in Arabic, and his first book in German, the poetry collection The Memory of Fingers, was published in 2020. The Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts awarded him the Chamisso Publication Scholarship for it. He also reads literary texts for millions of Arabic-speaking listeners on Tiklam.

This event takes place in cooperation with the Literary Colloquium Berlin.

The series “Literatures in Exile” is funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion of the State of Berlin.