Strangers at Home

Franz Friedrich is a Berlin-based novelist. He made his literary debut in 2014 with the novel Die Meisen von Uusimaa singen nicht mehr (S. Fischer Verlage) [The Uusima Chickadees No Longer Sing], which won the Jürgen Ponto Literature Prize and was longlisted for the German Book Prize that same year. His 2024 novel Die Passagierin (S. Fischer Verlage) [The Passenger] – a speculative fiction work involving time travel to a future sanatorium – was shortlisted for the Alfred Döblin Prize in 2023 and later longlisted for the German Book Prize following its publication. Over the past decade, Friedrich has been awarded various literary fellowships and grants, including the Helsinki City Writer Residency (2015), funding from the Berlin Senate (2017, 2019), a grant from the German Literature Fund (2022), and a New York scholarship for 2025. His writing is marked by a quiet, philosophical tone, often blending speculative elements with introspective character studies, a subtle sense of unease, and a persistent longing for utopia. Franz Friedrich is currently the writer-in-residence at Deutsches Haus at NYU, in cooperation with the Deutscher Literaturfonds.

Alois Hotschnig was born in Carinthia and lives in Innsbruck. His books, celebrated for their stylistic virtuosity and precision of observation, have won major Austrian and international prizes including the Federal Chancellery of Austria’s Literature Prize, the Italo Svevo Prize, the Erich Fried Prize, the Anton Wildgans Prize, the inaugural 2011 Gert Jonke Prize, and the ORF Radio Play of the Year Award, among others. These awards reflect Hotschnig’s mastery in examining universal concerns through the prism of an acute focus on the local. His latest novel is Der Silberfuchs meiner Mutter (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2021; translated by Tess Lewis as My Mother’s Silver Fox, Seagull Books, 2025).

Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel is Audition (Riverhead Books, 2025). One of President Obama’s 2025 Summer Reads, it was longlisted for the Booker Prize. She is also the author of Intimacies (Riverhead Books, 2021). One of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021, it was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was also one of President Obama’s Favorite Books of 2021. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Cullman Center Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature and the Prix Litteraire Lucien Barriere, Katie Kitamura’s work has been translated into 24 languages and is being adapted for film and television. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University.

Ariane Koch, born in Basel, studied Fine Arts and Interdisciplinarity. She writes theatre and performance texts, radio plays, and prose. For her debut novel Die Aufdrängung (Suhrkamp, 2021; translated as Overstaying, New York Review Books, 2024, translated by Damion Searls), she received the ZDF “aspekte” literature prize in 2021 and won a Swiss Literature Award in 2022. During the 2022/23 season, Ariane Koch was resident writer at Theater Basel. In this capacity, she wrote the play Kranke Hunde (Suhrkamp, 2024) [Sick Dogs], which was nominated for the Text & Sprache literature prize in 2024 and was published as a book. Ariane Koch is currently part of the literary-scientific SNF research project Autofiktion und Bewusstsein (Autofiction and Consciousness) at the Bern University of the Arts.

Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin, Anne Weber, Lutz Seiler, Philippe Jaccottet and Montaigne. Her translation of Maja Haderlap’s Engel des Vergessens (Wallstein Verlag, 2011) as Angel of Oblivion (Archipelago Books, 2016) won the ACFNY Translation Prize and the 2017 PEN Translation Award. Her essays and reviews have appeared in many journals and newspapers. A Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow as well as a "scholar of note" at the American Library in Paris, she serves as an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review and continues to curate Festival Neue Literatur, New York City’s annual festival of German-language literature in English.