Who I would have become if everything had turned out differently

An honest, profound examination of origin, identity and imagination

»Origin shapes our writing because it shapes the inner voices that we have to constantly deal with when writing.«

Nava Ebrahimi is one of those authors for whom interculturality is firmly inscribed both in her person and in her work. Her family fled from Iran to Germany in the early 1980s. Early on, Nava Ebrahimi was exposed to external ascriptions and had to find her own way.

In the first part of the volume, the Bachmann Prize winner explores her self, her roots as an author and a person, and provides insights into how writing gradually pushed itself to the fore and became unavoidable for her. She shows why the in-between, the ambiguous, and filling in the gaps of what you can’t see are so important to her. Part two focuses on writing, language and form. How difficult is it to use the first-person perspective? How does a process of cutting the cord between characters and author slowly take place during the writing process?