Cemile Sahin

In nine episodes, Cemile Sahin tells the story of people who find their exile in a high-rise building in western Turkey. All of them have experienced torture, violence and deportation. The author’s aim is to make these experiences representable.

She leaves it open which war it is about – she interweaves aspects of different conflicts. The scenes described are not invented, says Sahin, whoever deals with the Middle East inevitably comes into contact with such stories.

Above all, she brings to the fore the individual people who are always just pawns in any war: “My point in writing was that the civilian population never gets a word in edgewise. I wanted to tell the other side of war, of the people caught up in it and barely heard.”

This is how Sahin describes a mother loading her dead son onto a pickup truck. A man putting his sleeping daughter outside in the bushes before setting fire to his house. She wants to write about people who live in countries with a strong military tradition, she says. She does this in a mixture of script, protocol and reportage.

Cemile Sahin, born 1990, is a German artist, writer and columnist. She studied fine arts in London and at the Berlin University of the Arts. In 2019, her debut novel Taxi was published. She was recognized for her multimedia art with the ars viva young artist award; in 2020 she received the Alfred Döblin Medal for her debut novel and visual works.