"Orte - Ein Harbour-Front-Dialog"

A book about coming home - and about the places that know more about us than we do ourselves.

Saša Stanišić and Kristine Bilkau have created a joint evening for the Harbour Front Literaturfestival, developed specifically for Hamburg. The event grew out of a carte blanche given to Stanišić: who would he choose for a shared evening on stage? His answer came quickly - Kristine Bilkau. The two have never worked together in person before.

Under the theme "Orte" (Places), they travel to their literary and biographical landscapes: Bilkau's north with its waterways and close-knit neighbourhoods, an outdoor pool in light drizzle, Stanišić's Yugoslavia, Heidelberg, the Uckermark, and summer holiday camps. The conversation moves beyond literary presence into the concrete political and social dimensions of place and belonging - how people live, how communities form, and what the realities of place will look like tomorrow, especially for younger generations.

Saša Stanišić, born in 1978 in Višegrad, has lived in Germany since 1992; his novel Herkunft won the German Book Prize in 2019. Kristine Bilkau is a writer based in Hamburg who received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in the fiction category in 2025 for her novel Halbinsel.