Join us for an evening of literature and conversation. In collaboration with the Festival Neue Literatur 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 which will feature readings by and a conversation among authors Alois Hotschnig (Austria), Ariane Koch (Switzerland), and Khuê Phạm (Germany).
What are the obligations and limits of hospitality? When and how does familiarity tip into contempt? Can we ever truly 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”?
In this conversation, 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Alois Hotschnig | Austria
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).
Khuê Phạm | Germany
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.
Ariane Koch | Switzerland
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 (Overstaying), 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 (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.
Images © Alois Hotschnig, Alena Schmick, Pati Grabowicz
Image © Festival Neue Literatur