Topic of the evening: "Imagination and Telling The Truth"

open to the public, admission free

Haytham el-Wardany is a writer and translator who found his way from Cairo to Berlin in the late 90s, and since then moves between the two cities. He writes mostly in Arabic and lives in Arabic, English and German. He learned translation from this in-between traffic. Books being his favorite format, he has published seven about listening, sleeping, reading and other active passivities. He spent the last year listening to talking animals, learning from them how to speak in moments of danger. (https://nakoja-abad.work)

On the following day, Haytham el-Wardany will offer a workshop on the same topic for students of the HfG Karlsruhe.

In the workshop Imagination and Telling The Truth, Haytham el-Wardany wants to engage with others and reflect together on a question that concerns his writing, namely what it means to write in moments of historical danger, using two specific texts as anchors for discussion: "Writing the Truth - Five Difficulties" by Bertolt Brecht, written from his exile in Denmark in 1935, and "Five Metaphors On Healing" by Alaa Abd el-Fattah, written from his prison cell in Cairo in 2019. The two texts represent different contexts and different moments of historical danger, but both deal with questions of truth and writing, not as separate entities, but as a single historical process.