Festival Neue Literatur: Recognizing the Stranger

The 2025 edition of Festival Neue Literatur kicks off with Vietnamese-German writer Khuê Pham and Vietnamese-American author Monique Truong in a discussion of their respective books 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 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 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.

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 weekly Die Zeit. She also contributed op-eds to The Guardian and USA Today. In 2012, she co-wrote “We new Germans”, a non-fiction book about second-generation immigrants in Germany. Her debut novel “Brothers and Ghosts” was published in English translation in Australia, Britain and the US. She is also a performer in “Kim”, the stage adaptation of her novel, which has been touring in Germany and Taiwan. Khuê 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 (USA): 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’s 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

Festival Neue Literatur is a collaborative project of New York’s German-language cultural institutions: the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in New York, the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York, Deutsches Haus at NYU, and Goethe-Institut New York. Additional support for Festival Neue Literatur is provided by the German Federal Foreign Office, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. Several events in the series are presented in cooperation with Goethe-Institut Washington and the Austrian Cultural Forum Washington, D.C. All FNL events are free of charge, though RSVP is required. The 2025 festival will take place from October 21 to 24, 2025 in New York City and in Washington, D.C

Host or Publisher Goethe-Institut New York