WORDS TO LIFELINES - Reading & Talk

Words to Lifelines - the Importance of Imagination

In a world that feels increasingly unreal, shaped by wars, unrest, and the rise of autocracies, it can be tempting to treat imagination as a luxury, something private and escapist. But in dangerous political moments, imagination isn’t a distraction. It’s a lifeline.

Drawing on her latest work, My Dear You, a collection of stories written through years marked by political extremism and fear, current #PicadorProf Rachel Khong explores what fiction can do when reality becomes disorienting. Imagination helps us metabolize the present: to absorb it, transform it, and return it to us in forms we can finally feel, question, and understand. Imagination can save us in many ways.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Picador Guest Professorship. A programme that has brought 39 authors from the US and UK to Leipzig. Across two decades, these visits have created a literary lifeline: ideas exchanged in seminar rooms, across the city and the country, carried onward into books, essays, and poems - works that offer orientation, spark hope and change the way people live their lives.

Let's celebrate the anniversary together and discuss imagination as a necessity and words as lifelines - across borders, across crises, across politics.

The Picador Guest Professorship is brought to you by Uni Leipzig, American Studies Leipzig, DAAD Artist Program and Holtzbrinck Berlin.

In cooperation with EDIT Magazine, with Kiepenheuer & Witsch and their project "Deutschland liest ein Buch"!

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Host or Publisher Picador Guest Professorship for Literature