Award-winning German-Russian author Lena Gorelik will discuss her work and the impact of literary engagement on society.
Whether as a journalist, essayist, or author of novels, plays, and short stories, questions of belonging, migration, and the German memory culture, as well as the relationship between literature and sociopolitical engagement in general, play a central role in Lena Gorelik’s writing. In her texts, she not only draws attention to a pluralistic, post-migrant reality, but also presents it in all its ambivalence in an aesthetically complex manner. Her writing reflects on the possibilities of literature, but also on the voices and stories that receive little or no attention in the German public sphere.

Lena Gorelik will discuss her work and the concept of so-called “post-migrant” literature with the literary scholars Saskia Fischer (Leibniz Universität Hannover) and Ela Gezen (University of Massachusetts Amherst).

The event is co-sponsored by the Goethe-Institut New York, the Deutsches Haus at NYU, the Leo Baeck Institute New York and the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It is also part of a workshop within the AHRC-research project “Rethinking Holocaust Literature: Contexts, Canons, Circulation”.


Lena Gorelik’s oeuvre includes several award-winning novels, plays, and essays. Most recently, she was awarded the “Text und Sprache” literary prize of the Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft in 2022 for her novel Wer wir sind. In the academic year 2022/23, she held the “NEUE DEUTSCHE LITERATUR Poetics Professorship” at Leibniz Universität Hannover, in November 2023 she received the Marieluise Fleißer Preis, and in early 2024 the prestigious Heinrich-Mann-Preis of the Akademie der Künste.


Saskia Fischer, Ph.D., is a research associate in the Department of German and Comparative Literature at Leibniz Universität Hannover. She has been appointed Max Kade Visiting Professor at Michigan State University for Spring 2025. She is the author of Ritual und Ritualität im Drama nach 1945 (2019) and co-editor of the volumes: Lagerliteratur: Schreibweisen, Zeugnisse, Didaktik (2021) and Guilt, Forgiveness, and Moral Repair (2022), among others.


Ela Gezen is an Associate Professor of German at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research and teaching focus on 20th and 21st century German literature and culture, with emphases on literatures of migration, minority discourses, and transnationalism. Her first book Brecht, Turkish Theater, and Turkish-German Literature studies the significance of Bertolt Brecht for Turkish and Turkish German literature. Currently, she is working on her second book, Cultures in Migration, which examines cultural practices by Turkish artists throughout the 1970s. In addition to her editorial work, she has published articles on music, theater, and literature, focusing on the intersection between aesthetics and politics in both Turkish and German contexts.