Strangers at Home

In collaboration with the Festival Neue Literatur (FNL) in New York, the Zeitgeist Literature Festival in Washington DC – co-organized by the Goethe-Institut Washington, the Embassy of Switzerland, and the Austrian Cultural Forum Washington – presents Strangers at Home, featuring readings and a conversation with authors Alois Hotschnig (Austria), Ariane Koch (Switzerland), and Khuê Pham (Germany).

What are the obligations and limits of hospitality? When and how does familiarity tip into contempt? Can we ever fully know the people closest to us? Can we truly know our own slippery selves? Why, as the narrator in Overstaying asks, do “our minds always seek out what’s known in the unknown, instead of surrendering to the unknown?"

These acclaimed German-language authors will read from their recent work and discuss how they use literature to disrupt conventional notions of the familiar and the strange, of self and other, of identity, intimacy, belonging, and estrangement. Identity is pressure-tested to surprising and unexpected effect in these engaging and thought-provoking stories.

Khuê Pham

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 German weekly Die Zeit. She also contributed op-eds to The Guardian and USA Today. In 2012, she co-wrote Wir neuen Deutschen (Rowohlt, 2012) [We New Germans], a non-fiction book about second-generation immigrants in Germany. Her debut novel Wo auch immer ihr seid (Penguin, 2021; translated by Daryl Lindsay and Charles Hawley as Brothers and Ghosts, Scribe, 2024) was published in English translation in Australia, Britain, and the U.S. She is also a performer in Kim, the stage adaptation of her novel, which has been touring in Germany and Taiwan. Khuê Pham 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.

Alois Hotschnig

Alois Hotschnig was born in Carinthia and lives in Innsbruck. His books, celebrated for their stylistic virtuosity and precision of observation, have won major Austrian and international prizes including the Federal Chancellery of Austria’s Literature Prize, the Italo Svevo Prize, the Erich Fried Prize, the Anton Wildgans Prize, the inaugural 2011 Gert Jonke Prize, and the ORF Radio Play of the Year Award, among others. These awards reflect Hotschnig’s mastery in examining universal concerns through the prism of an acute focus on the local. His latest novel is Der Silberfuchs meiner Mutter (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2021; translated by Tess Lewis as My Mother’s Silver Fox, Seagull Books, 2025).

Ariane Koch

Ariane Koch, born in Basel, studied Fine Arts and Interdisciplinarity. She writes theatre and performance texts, radio plays, and prose. For her debut novel Die Aufdrängung (Suhrkamp, 2021; translated as Overstaying, New York Review Books, 2024, translated by Damion Searls), she received the ZDF “aspekte” literature prize in 2021 and won a Swiss Literature Award in 2022. During the 2022/23 season, Ariane Koch was resident writer at Theater Basel. In this capacity, she wrote the play Kranke Hunde (Suhrkamp, 2024) [Sick Dogs], which was nominated for the Text & Sprache literature prize in 2024 and was published as a book. Ariane Koch is currently part of the literary-scientific SNF research project Autofiktion und Bewusstsein (Autofiction and Consciousness) at the Bern University of the Arts.

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Host or Publisher Goethe-Institut and ICWA