Der Literarische Salon mit Samar Yazbek

Was nun in Syrien?

The surprising fall of the dictator Bashar al-Assad has completely changed the situation in Syria and the Middle East. Writer and journalist Samar Yazbek is one of the best-known protagonists of the Syrian revolution. Born in 1970 in Jebleh, a small town on the Mediterranean coast, she established herself as one of the most important voices in young Arabic literature with her first volumes of short stories. After the outbreak of the revolution, she was targeted by the secret service and fled to Paris in 2011, where she was awarded the prestigious PEN/Pinter Prize for courageous international writers for her book Cry for Freedom. She received the Swedish Tucholsky Prize in 2012 and the Oxfam Novib/PEN Award in 2013. In 2015, she reported in the book The Stolen Revolution. Reise in mein zerstörtes Syrien (The Stolen Revolution. Journey to my Destroyed Syria). Most recently, she published Where the Wind Dwells, perhaps the most artistic and at the same time most desperate outcry against war and forgetting. In it, she describes the last hours of a young soldier's life in Syria - "Samar Yazbek's best, indeed most beautiful novel to date", according to SWR. Now Syria is once again the focus of world attention, Samar Yazbek looks at the events in conversation with Guy Helmiger and Navid Kermani.
Translation: Larissa Bender