Cemile Sahin

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

She leaves open which war it is about – she interweaves aspects of different conflicts. The scenes described are not fictional, says Sahin. Anyone who deals with the Middle East is bound to come 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 the war, about the people who are caught up in it and are hardly heard.”

This is how Sahin describes a mother loading her dead son onto a pickup truck. A man who puts his sleeping daughter outside in the bushes before setting fire to his house. She says she wants to write about people who live in countries with a strong military tradition. 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. Her debut novel Taxi was published in 2019. Her multimedia art was recognized with the ars viva young artist award; in 2020, she received the Alfred Döblin Medal for her debut novel and visual works.

In the series Young Voices at LiZ

In cooperation with the City of Heidelberg, Office for Equal Opportunities and Mosaik Deutschland e.V. as part of the federal program Demokratie leben! of the Federal Ministry for Families, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth.