Traces to Syria - reading and discussion with Suleman Taufiq

The author Suleman Taufiq, who grew up in Damascus, is based on his novel “Café Dunya. A Day in Damascus” which is a tribute to his hometown and a journey through the memory of Syria. With a fine power of observation and a gentle sense of humour, he conjures up atmospheric images from a sinking, oriental world. The author also reads text excerpts from his new volume of poetry "I Tame Hope".
Suleman Taufiq is known as a poet, storyteller, music critic and editor and translator of Arabic literature. He was born in 1953, came to Germany at the age of 18 and studied philosophy and comparative literature. He has lived in Aachen as a freelance writer since 1981. In addition to novels, stories and essays, he mainly published poems and children's books and translated many Arabic works into German and numerous German poets into Arabic. He also works as an author for television and radio, e.g. for WDR, SWR and DLR.
In 1983 he received the Walter Hasenclever Prize from the city of Aachen, and in 1990 and 2014 he received a working grant for writers from the Ministry of Education in North Rhine-Westphalia. In 2015 he was nominated for the European CIVIS Radio Prize, and he also received the Media Prize of the Professional Association of Paediatricians in the radio category.
His literature is a bridge between two cultures - which can not be so foreign. "I don't live in two worlds, I am two worlds," says Taufiq. In his new poems he takes us into a wonderful foreign world, a world with all its transience, excess, changeability, imponderability, on a poetic journey between places, languages ​​and times.

Admission is free and we look forward to seeing you there!