Recognizing the Stranger

Khuê Pham is an award-winning Vietnamese-German journalist and writer. A graduate of the London School of Economics, she worked as a producer for NPR’s Berlin bureau before becoming an editor at the German weekly Die Zeit. She also contributed op-eds to The Guardian and USA Today. In 2012, she co-wrote Wir neuen Deutschen (Rowohlt, 2012) [We New Germans], a non-fiction book about second-generation immigrants in Germany. Her debut novel Wo auch immer ihr seid (Penguin, 2021; translated by Daryl Lindsay and Charles Hawley as Brothers and Ghosts, Scribe, 2024) was published in English translation in Australia, Britain, and the U.S. She is also a performer in Kim, the stage adaptation of her novel, which has been touring in Germany and Taiwan. Khuê Pham is currently writing her second novel and has recently received a grant by the German Literary Foundation to support her work. A founding member of the PEN Berlin writer`s association, she is also a juror for the International Literature Prize, an award for global literature translated into German.

Born in Saigon, S. Vietnam, Monique Truong came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. She’s a novelist, essayist, children’s book author, and librettist. Her novels are The Sweetest Fruits (Viking, 2019), Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), and the national bestseller The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), with German translations published by C.H. Beck. A graduate of Yale College and Columbia Law School, she’s received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Hodder Fellowship, American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, Young Lions Fiction Award, Bard Fiction Prize, and John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, among other honors. She served as the inaugural festival chairperson for FNL in 2015 and 2016.