2025, marked the 15th anniversary of Festival Neue Literatur (October 21–22), the first and only festival to spotlight German-language and U.S. fiction together. The theme of the 2025 festival, curated by Tess Lewis was Strangers at Home.
The writers and literary luminaries featured this year – Franz Friedrich, Alois Hotschnig, Katie Kitamura, Ariane Koch, Khuê Pham, and Monique Truong – explore in their work questions of trust, suspicion, intimacy and estrangement and how they influence the ways we perceive ourselves and others in public and private spheres.
About this year’s festival, curator Tess Lewis says: “The thrill of Festival Neue Literatur is having six writers from four countries challenge and expand the way we see the world around us and our place in it. Their books expose blind spots in our notions of what is familiar and what is strange, making us look again – more closely or aslant – at what we think we see.
Please download the full press release here.
"Recognizing the Stranger"
Tuesday, October 21 at 6:30 PM
Goethe-Institut New York
30 Irving Place, New York, NY 10003
On Tuesday, October 21, at 6:30 PM, the Festival Neue Literatur partners present "Recognizing the Stranger" and a conversation between the authors Khuê Pham and Monique Truong about their novels Brothers and Ghosts and The Book of Salt.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, join us for an evening of conversation between these two renowned authors, whose works explore the tangled legacy of war across generations and its effects on the search for identity. Pham’s debut novel, Brothers and Ghosts, follows a young woman in Berlin who uncovers family secrets rooted in the Vietnam War, revealing generational trauma and fractured loyalties, while Truong’s 2003 debut novel, The Book of Salt, tells the story of a Vietnamese cook in 1920s Paris, entwining themes of exile, queer identity, and the legacy of colonialism. Together, these works reflect on displacement, memory, and the threads which connect past and present.
Participating speakers:
Khuê Pham (GER): Khuê Pham is an award-winning Vietnamese-German journalist and writer. A graduate of the London School of Economics, she worked as a producer for NPR’s Berlin bureau before becoming an editor at the German weekly Die Zeit. She also contributed op-eds to The Guardian and USA Today. In 2012, she co-wrote Wir neuen Deutschen (Rowohlt, 2012) [We New Germans], a non-fiction book about second-generation immigrants in Germany. Her debut novel Wo auch immer ihr seid (Penguin, 2021; translated by Daryl Lindsay and Charles Hawley as Brothers and Ghosts, Scribe, 2024) was published in English translation in Australia, Britain, and the U.S. She is also a performer in Kim, the stage adaptation of her novel, which has been touring in Germany and Taiwan. Khuê Pham is currently writing her second novel and has recently received a grant by the German Literary Foundation to support her work. A founding member of the PEN Berlin writer`s association, she is also a juror for the International Literature Prize, an award for global literature translated into German.
Monique Truong (U.S.): Born in Saigon, S. Vietnam, Monique Truong came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. She’s a novelist, essayist, children’s book author, and librettist. Her novels are The Sweetest Fruits (Viking, 2019), Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), and the national bestseller The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), with German translations published by C.H. Beck. A graduate of Yale College and Columbia Law School, she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Hodder Fellowship, American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, Young Lions Fiction Award, Bard Fiction Prize, and John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, among other honors. She served as the inaugural festival chairperson for FNL in 2015 and 2016.
"Strangers at Home"
Wednesday, October 22 at 6:30 PM
Austrian Cultural Forum New York
11 East 52nd Street, New York, NY 10022
On Wednesday, October 22, at 6:30 PM, the Festival Neue Literatur partners present the 2025 Friedrich Ulfers Prize and the Festival Neue Literatur event, "Strangers at Home.”
This year’s Friedrich Ulfers Prize will be awarded posthumously to the translator and author Tim Mohr. Michael Reynolds (Europa Editions) will deliver the laudation, and Erin Clarke will offer acceptance remarks on behalf of her late husband.
The Festival Neue Literatur event, "Strangers at Home” will feature readings by and a conversation among Franz Friedrich, Alois Hotschnig, Ariane Koch and Katie Kitamura. The conversation will be moderated by Tess Lewis, who curated this year's festival edition.
About "Strangers at Home”
What are the obligations and limits of hospitality? When and how does familiarity tip into contempt? Can we ever truly know the people closest to us? Can we truly know our own slippery selves? Why, as the narrator in Overstaying asks, do “our minds always seek out what’s known in the unknown, instead of surrendering to the unknown?”
In this conversation, a Festival Neue Literatur (FNL) event, acclaimed German- and English-language authors Franz Friedrich, Alois Hotschnig, Ariane Koch and Katie Kitamura will read from their recent work and discuss how they use literature to disrupt conventional notions of the familiar and the strange, of self and other, of identity, intimacy, belonging and estrangement. Identity is pressure-tested to surprising and unexpected effect in these stories of time travelers haunted by phantom memories, of a man trying to piece together his suppressed memories from a childhood under the shadow of the Nazi Lebensborn program, of a puzzling visitor who may be a tourist, a refugee, a colonizer, opportunist, lover, vampire or pet, of an actress whose roles ultimately upstage her. The conversation will be moderated by award-winning literary translator and writer and festival curator Tess Lewis.
Participating speakers:
Franz Friedrich (GER): Franz Friedrich is a Berlin-based novelist. He made his literary debut in 2014 with the novel Die Meisen von Uusimaa singen nicht mehr (S. Fischer Verlage) [The Uusima Chickadees No Longer Sing], which won the Jürgen Ponto Literature Prize and was longlisted for the German Book Prize that same year. His 2024 novel Die Passagierin (S. Fischer Verlage) [The Passenger] – a speculative fiction work involving time travel to a future sanatorium – was shortlisted for the Alfred Döblin Prize in 2023 and later longlisted for the German Book Prize following its publication. Over the past decade, Friedrich has been awarded various literary fellowships and grants, including the Helsinki City Writer Residency (2015), funding from the Berlin Senate (2017, 2019), a grant from the German Literature Fund (2022), and a New York scholarship for 2025. His writing is marked by a quiet, philosophical tone, often blending speculative elements with introspective character studies, a subtle sense of unease, and a persistent longing for utopia. Franz Friedrich is currently the writer-in-residence at Deutsches Haus at NYU, in cooperation with the Deutscher Literaturfonds.
Alois Hotschnig (AUT): Alois Hotschnig was born in Carinthia and lives in Innsbruck. His books, celebrated for their stylistic virtuosity and precision of observation, have won major Austrian and international prizes including the Federal Chancellery of Austria’s Literature Prize, the Italo Svevo Prize, the Erich Fried Prize, the Anton Wildgans Prize, the inaugural 2011 Gert Jonke Prize, and the ORF Radio Play of the Year Award, among others. These awards reflect Hotschnig’s mastery in examining universal concerns through the prism of an acute focus on the local. His latest novel is Der Silberfuchs meiner Mutter (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2021; translated by Tess Lewis as My Mother’s Silver Fox, Seagull Books, 2025).
Katie Kitamura (U.S.): Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel is Audition (Riverhead Books, 2025). One of President Obama’s 2025 Summer Reads, it was longlisted for the Booker Prize. She is also the author of Intimacies (Riverhead Books, 2021). One of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021, it was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was also one of President Obama’s Favorite Books of 2021. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Cullman Center Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature, and the Prix Litteraire Lucien Barriere, Katie Kitamura’s work has been translated into 24 languages and is being adapted for film and television. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University.
Ariane Koch (CH): Ariane Koch, born in Basel, studied Fine Arts and Interdisciplinarity. She writes theatre and performance texts, radio plays, and prose. For her debut novel Die Aufdrängung (Suhrkamp, 2021; translated as Overstaying, Dorothy, 2024, translated by Damion Searls), she received the ZDF “aspekte” literature prize in 2021 and won a Swiss Literature Award in 2022. During the 2022/23 season, Ariane Koch was resident writer at Theater Basel. In this capacity, she wrote the play Kranke Hunde (Suhrkamp, 2024) [Sick Dogs], which was nominated for the Text & Sprache literature prize in 2024 and was published as a book. Ariane Koch is currently part of the literary-scientific SNF research project Autofiktion und Bewusstsein (Autofiction and Consciousness) at the Bern University of the Arts.
Tess Lewis (U.S.): Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin, Anne Weber, Lutz Seiler, Philippe Jaccottet, and Montaigne. Her translation of Maja Haderlap’s Engel des Vergessens (Wallstein Verlag, 2011) as Angel of Oblivion (Archipelago Books, 2016) won the ACFNY Translation Prize and the 2017 PEN Translation Award. Her essays and reviews have appeared in many journals and newspapers. A Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow as well as a "scholar of note" at the American Library in Paris, she serves as an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review and continues to curate Festival Neue Literatur, New York City’s annual festival of German-language literature in English.
About the Friedrich Ulfers Prize 2025:
This year, the Festival Neue Literatur partners proudly present the 2025 Friedrich Ulfers Prize posthumously to the translator and author Tim Mohr, recognized for his distinguished contributions to bringing German-language voices to English-speaking readers. Michael Reynolds (Europa Editions) will deliver the laudation, and Erin Clarke will offer acceptance remarks on behalf of her late husband.
The Friedrich Ulfers Prize was established in 2013 and is awarded annually by Deutsches Haus at New York University to a leading publisher, writer, critic, translator, or scholar who has championed the advancement of German-language literature in the United States. The prize, which is endowed with a $5000 grant, has previously been awarded to Edwin Frank, Tess Lewis, Riky Stock, Jill Schoolman, Susan Bernofsky, Barbara Perlmutter, Barbara Epler, Burton Pike, Robert Weil, Sara Bershtel, and Carol Brown Janeway. The Friedrich Ulfers Prize is Festival Neue Literatur’s testimony to the rising importance of German-language literature in America.
Friedrich Ulfers was Associate Professor of German at New York University. In the past, he served as Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Science, the German Department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies, Director of the NYU in Berlin Summer Program, and Director of Deutsches Haus at NYU. The recipient of NYU's Distinguished Teaching Medal and Great Teacher Award, and two-time winner of the College of Arts and Science's Golden Dozen Award for Excellence in Teaching, Ulfers has taught not only in the German Department but also in NYU's interdisciplinary programs, offering courses that engage a range of interests, including literary theory, continental philosophy, and the relationships between science, literature, and philosophy. Friedrich Ulfers also served as a professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he taught an intensive summer seminar on Nietzsche and 20th/21st Century Thought and gave a variety of lectures. From 2006-2009, he was Dean of the Media and Communications Division of the School, and in 2009, he was appointed Professor Emeritus. Friedrich Ulfers received the Heights College’s Faculty Hall of Fame Award and the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany) for his commitment to German-American relations in the areas of culture and education.
Washington DC Event: "Strangers at Home"
Friday, October 24 at 6:30 PM
Goethe-Institut Washington DC
1377 R St. NW, 3rd Floor, Washington, DC 20009
Festival Neue Literatur | Zeitgeist Literature Festival | Readings & conversation with authors Alois Hotschnig, Ariane Koch and Khuê Pham
In collaboration with the Festival Neue Literatur (FNL) in New York, the Zeitgeist Literature Festival in Washington DC – co-organized by the Goethe-Institut Washington, the Embassy of Switzerland, and the Austrian Cultural Forum Washington – presents Strangers at Home, featuring readings and a conversation with authors Alois Hotschnig (Austria), Ariane Koch (Switzerland), and Khuê Pham (Germany).
What are the obligations and limits of hospitality? When and how does familiarity tip into contempt? Can we ever fully know the people closest to us? Can we truly know our own slippery selves? Why, as the narrator in Overstaying asks, do “our minds always seek out what’s known in the unknown, instead of surrendering to the unknown?"
These acclaimed German-language authors will read from their recent work and discuss how they use literature to disrupt conventional notions of the familiar and the strange, of self and other, of identity, intimacy, belonging, and estrangement. Identity is pressure-tested to surprising and unexpected effect in these engaging and thought-provoking stories.