Navid Kermani

A romantic novel like no other. A writer has penned a novel about the great love of his youth. After a public reading, he is approached by a woman he doesn’t recognize—but it’s his lover. He is the author; she, the figure in his novel. The young girl from back then has turned into an interesting and attractive woman—but she’s...

This book ventures into the world beyond Lampedusa: the crisis belt that stretches from Kashmir across Pakistan and Afghanistan to the Arab world and beyond, to the borders and coasts of Europe. Celebrated author Navid Kermani reports from a region which is our immediate neighbour, despite all too often being depicted as remote and distant from our daily concerns. Kermani...

Navid Kermani is not only one of Germany’s most distinguished writers and public intellectuals, he is also an outstanding public speaker who mesmerises audiences with his well-crafted sentences and turns of phrase. Whether he is speaking about the plight of refugees or delivering a eulogy at his father’s graveside, Kermani finds words that surprise his listeners, enlighten them, provoke them,...

‘When your grandpa was in hospital, he asked me one night to promise him that, when he had gone from us, I would teach you Islam – our Islam: the Islam I grew up with … In that dark, impersonal room, he was thinking of you.’ This is why one father began to teach his daughter night after night not...

What is Possible Now by Navid Kermani showcases the work of one of the remarkable public intellectuals of his generation. Kermani's approach is neither rigid nor definitive, marked instead by a probing, observant style. His thinking often ventures beyond well-trodden paths, persistently seeking to understand the larger context around current events. Renowned for his prize-winning novels and significant non-fiction works,...

Between Germany and Russia is a region strewn with monuments to the horrors of war, genocide, and disaster – the bloodlands where the murderous regimes of Hitler and Stalin unleashed the violence that scarred the twentieth century and shaped so much of the world we know today. In September 2016, the German-Iranian writer Navid Kermani set out to discover this...

By foot, in buses, prison vans and trains, a steady stream of refugees travelled from the Greek island of Lesbos into Europe. In the autumn of 2015, award-winning writer Navid Kermani decided to accompany them on the "Balkan route." In this perceptive account from the front line of the "refugee crisis," Kermani shows how a seemingly distant world, in which...

What happens when one of Germany’s most important writers, himself a Muslim, immerses himself in the world of Christian art? In this book, Navid Kermani is awestruck by a religion full of sacrifice and lamentation, love and wonder, the irrational and the unfathomable, the deeply human and the divine – a Christianity that today’s Christians rarely speak of so earnestly,...

Navid Kermani is not only one of Germany’s most distinguished writers and public intellectuals, he is also an outstanding public speaker who mesmerises audiences with his well-crafted sentences and turns of phrase. Whether he is speaking about the plight of refugees or delivering a eulogy at his father’s graveside, Kermani finds words that surprise his listeners, enlighten them, provoke them,...