Der Literarische Salon mit Nora Bossong

Moderation: Guy Helminger und Navid Kermani

Since 2005, Guy Helminger and Navid Kermani have been inviting writers they are enthusiastic about to their Literary Salon in Cologne's Stadtgarten. The guest reads from his own books, but also brings texts that are particularly important to him. After the break he presents what else moves him: records, pictures, videos or what other writers negotiate when readings are actually over.

"The charm of this series of events lies in its openness. Unlike a conventional reading, there is a relaxed conviviality in which truths are quickly revealed." (Cologne Review)

This time with me: Nora Bossong

No, it is not just the versatility that makes Nora Bossong, born in Bremen in 1982, one of the most interesting voices in German literature: poet, novelist, political intellectual, globetrotter, reporter and, since this year, Parisian! It is, as one critic of "time" aptly put it, the "casual perfection with which it hides the depth on the surface". Not only did she receive the Peter Huchel Prize or the Roswitha Prize for her work, but she herself became the named heroine of a story with which her colleague Nora Gomringer again won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.

After Bossong's much-discussed reportage from the sex business ("Rotlicht", 2017) and a widely acclaimed volume of poetry ("Crusade with a Dog", 2018), her new novel "Schutzzone" ("Protection Zone") about a United Nations employee in Geneva who loses herself in private and political interests in dealing with the genocide in Burundi will be published this autumn. If anyone can capture our bourgeois, supposedly philanthropic existence in its contradictions, it is Nora Bossong.