Following on from her debut novel “The Summer”, in her latest novel “Seventy-Four” Ronya Othmann offers a poignant literary portrayal of our time. How to speak of the unspeakable? “I have tried using form, language, quotes; I have quoted, documented and edited a lot. The fiction arose in language through the process of montage.” The unspeakable is the genocide of the Yazidi people, the seventy-fourth, perpetrated by IS in 2014 in Shingal.

The book tells of a journey back to the original sites of the atrocities: the camps and the front lines, in the living rooms of relatives and then further to a now deserted Yazidi village in Turkey. Othmann interweaves pictures and reports with her own story, with her life as a journalist and author in Germany. “Language creating a vast expanse of landscapes ... such a personal and moving novel.” (Deutschlandfunk, Büchermarkt)

The VorLaut reading series gives up-and-coming authors a stage: similar to the opening act in music, they perform their lyrics in front of established authors.