Writing Solidarity: Literature in Collaboration

Atefe Asadi, Daniela Dröscher and David Herd

conversation and reading moderated by Cecile Sandten and Dirk Wiemann

This panel asks what writing in solidarity might look like - a question that is particularly urgent in times of ever tightening border regimes, the normalisation of xenophobic rhetoric, and the tendency towards national compartmentalisation. The three authors in this panel are involved in literary projects that uphold pluralism, diversity, and freedom of expression. In supporting the right to human movement across national borders as much as the right to write and publish in places of refuge, both Weiter Schreiben.jetzt and Refugee Tales intervene in German or British publics. Importantly, collaborative forms of writing are an integral part of both projects.

Atefe Asadi and Daniela Dröscher are tandem partners in the platform Weiter Schreiben.jetzt. Since 2017, the project has offered refugee authors in Germany and Switzerland the opportunity to continue writing in their mother tongue, to have their texts translated and to publish them online: a great enrichment for the German-language literary landscape.

David Herd has been co-organising the Refugee Tales project since 2014. Refugee Tales calls for a future without detention by sharing the stories of people who have experienced indefinite detention in the UK. The stories have been published in five volumes by Comma Press.

Following the panel discussion, the three authors will read from their work:

Atefe Asadi and Daniela Dröscher: “From Butterfly to Butterfly”

“From butterfly to butterfly”: this is how Virginia Woolf used to sign her letters to close friends and colleagues. Under this title, Atefe and Daniela will share excerpts from their own correspondence, which is a collaborative literary experiment: in a series of letters written in their native languages, Farsi and German, the two authors explore and celebrate a universal theme – the night – both emotionally and intellectually. For the reading in our conference, the authors have translated their letters into English so that we all may enjoy the beauty of difference and the bridging force of (written) words.

David Herd: “Walk Song”

Written between 2015 and 2020, the poems of Walk Song build through a series of sequences which look to animate solidarities and the languages of rights. Taking their bearings from the Refugee Tales project, and always grounded in the collective walk, these are poems of friendship and movement, of landscape and politics, of action and hope. Addressing the environments we have made, the border and its hostilities, Walk Song sets out to picture settings in which the language might be opened, step by step.

Atefe Asadi is an Iranian writer, poet, editor, and translator, known for her role in Iran’s underground literature. Her three short-story collections were banned by Iran’s Ministry of Culture, and her literary activities and protest participation led to persecution and arrest. She later became an ICORN guest writer, received the Hannah Arendt Fellowship, and relocated to Germany. There, she advocates for literature in exile through school lectures, interviews, cultural programs, Weiterschreiben Jetzt (since 2023), and fellowships such as Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen and Kultur Ensemble in Palermo. Her works, exploring women’s rights, migration, discrimination, and freedom, are translated into English, German, and Italian. Her first short-story collection is currently being translated into German.

Daniela Dröscher holds a doctorate in media studies from the University of Potsdam and a diploma in scenic writing from the University of Graz. Her debut novel, Die Lichter des George Psalmanazar, was published in 2009, followed by the short story collection Gloria (2010) and the novel Pola (2012) as well as the memoir Zeige deine Klasse (2018). She has been honoured with the Anna Seghers Prize, the German Literature Fund Working Scholarship and the Robert Gernhardt Prize (2017), among others. The novel Lügen über meine Mutter (2022) was shortlisted for the German Book Prize and can soon be seen in the cinema. She is the tandem partner of Atefe Asadi in the weiter schreiben.jetzt project.

David Herd is a poet, critic and co-organiser of the project Refugee Tales. His work is at the intersection of literature and human rights. David’s critical history, Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World: Making Space for the Human (OUP) was shortlisted for the 2024 MSA Book Prize and will be published in paperback in June 2025. His most recent collection of poetry, Walk Song (2022), was a Book of the Year in the Australian Review of Books. In collaboration with Anna Pincus and colleagues at Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, David has co-organised the project Refugee Tales since 2014, through which he has helped articulate the call for a future without detention. Refugee Tales makes its call by sharing the stories of people who have experienced indefinite detention in the UK, now published in 5 volumes by Comma Press.