Navid Kermani

Navid Kermani, born in 1967 in Siegen, lives as a freelance writer in Cologne. He is a habilitated Orientalist and a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry and of the 1st FC Cologne. From 2000 to 2003 he was a Long Term Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and from 2009 to 2012 a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen. He spent 2008 as a fellow at the Villa Massimo in Rome. He has given the Poetics Lectures in Frankfurt, Göttingen, and Mainz; he has been a visiting professor at the University of Frankfurt, at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, and at Dartmouth College in the United States. Together with Guy Helminger, he has hosted the Literary Salon in Cologne's Stadtgarten since 2006. At the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, he has co-directed the "Heart Center" with Carl Hegemann since 2012. For his novels, essays, reportages and monographs, Navid Kermani has received the Kleist Prize, the Hölderlin Prize, the Joseph Breitbach Prize and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, among others. His non-fiction books are published by C. H. Beck, his literary works by Carl Hanser Verlag. His books have been translated into numerous languages.