Taqi Akhlaqi
Biography
About the author:
Taqi Akhlaqi was born in Afghanistan in March 1986. He was still a child when his family emigrated to Iran, where he went to school. In 2004 he returned to Afghanistan with his family and studied international relations at a private university in Kabul.
His love of literature has kept him reading and writing over the past twenty years and helped him survive the war conditions in Afghanistan. He has received a number of awards and recognitions for his literary work. His debut novel “Kabul 1400” (originally written in Farsi/Dari) was published by Borj Verlag in Iran in August 2023. In 2018, his short story collection “Out of the Blue” was published by Edition Tethys in Potsdam. His play “You can’t fight without tea” will be staged in April 2024 in both Krefeld and Mönchengladbach. He regularly reports on the situation in Afghanistan for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Since September 2021, after the return of the Taliban, he has been living with his family as a freelance writer in Berlin.
Last Released
Somebody understand the Germans
Protagonist Taqi Akhlaqi is a writer, traveler and Nietzsche fan. With a very special idea of Germany and a work scholarship for the Heinrich Böll House Langenbroich in his pocket, his path leads him to the Düren district. Before this trip he had only seen Europe through its literature and art, and only knew it through its writers and philosophers.
However, the Germany that Taqi Akhlaqi reveals is wondrous and full of surprises. He skillfully weaves together the present and the past, some of his stored memories are evoked, new experiences become memories. What initially seems fragmentary gradually creates a coherent picture. He reflects on his experiences so thoroughly, so ruthlessly self-critically and with so much humor that anyone who reads his observations is inspired to question their own customs, everyday rituals and ways of thinking, to “alienate themselves”, as the author puts it, and so on to discover your own society with new eyes.
In this novel, Taqi Akhlaqi succeeds in combining humor with serious topics without ridiculing them. It gives time to accept and process the serious topics before the text becomes lighter and more humorous again.
