Sent / to read / attend

A very quick January update on a letter sent, a special issue to read, and an event to attend.

In my previous blog post, I had pointed out factual inaccuracies at the basis of the controversy around the Peter-Weiss-Preis, which were then also reproduced in the official statement by the Bochum politicians Barbara Jessel (Die Grünen), Sonja Gräf (SPD), Monika Pieper (CDU), and Daniel Gorin (Die Grünen). While they had been informed about these findings in the meantime, there has so far been no public acknowledgment or correction of the false claims they cited regarding the group “Artists for Palestine UK” and the designated prize-winner Sharon Dodua Otoo. I’ve therefore emailed off this letter to the party offices in question this morning (alongside the information that I will publicly share it – in the hope of a response that also addresses the wider public).

In much more more joyful news regarding Otoo, a fresh special issue on her work has just been published: Sharon Dodua Otoo – Literature, Politics, Possibility is an open-access issue of German Life and Letters that has been edited by Sarah Colvin and Tara Talwar Windsor and that contains articles by joseph kebe-nguema, Stephanie Galasso, Kyung-Ho Cha, Áine McMurtry, Alrik Daldrup, Jon Cho-Polizzi, and both co-editors. I’m very excited to read it and continue to be grateful that I got to attend the excellent 2022 symposium that Sarah Colvin, Stephanie Galasso and Tara Talwar Windsor organised in Cambridge and that led to this publication!

Lastly, I’d like to warmly invite everyone in and around Amsterdam to the panel discussion Disrupting Literature: Anti-Racist Strategies for Dutch and German Publishing on Wednesday, 31 January. I’m looking forward to hosting this conversation with Elisa Diallo and Ebissé Wakjira at the Goethe-Institut Amsterdam and it has been very rewarding to co-organise it alongside Fabian Reichle. Entry is free, but please make sure to RSVP via the link above – all welcome! Relating back to the issues addressed in my last post here, too: it has been good to see the president of the Goethe-Institut, Carola Lentz, take a stance for genuinely international and independent cultural work.