Berlin Fellowship 2025 — Literature

Vita

Atefe Asadi is an Iranian writer, poet, editor, and translator, known for her role in Iran’s underground literature. Iran’s Ministry of Culture banned her three short-story collections, and her literary activities and protest participation led to persecution and arrest. She later became an ICORN guest writer, received the Hannah Arendt Fellowship, and relocated to Germany. She now advocates for literature in exile through school lectures, interviews, cultural programmes, “Weiterschreiben Jetzt” (since 2023), and fellowships such as the Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen and Kultur Ensemble in Palermo. Her works, exploring women’s rights, migration, discrimination, and freedom, are translated into English, German, and Italian. Her first short-story collection is currently being translated into German.

Residency

During my residency, I am focusing on the final editing phase of a new short story collection, while simultaneously preparing a selection of my poems for publication in a bilingual Persian-German volume. It is my first poetry publication in Germany, and many of the featured poems were written in the aftermath of my departure from Iran.

The collection engages with themes of womanhood, migration, and the intimate complexities of living and writing in a new language. Women appear not only as subjects but also as narrative forces, shaping the emotional and intellectual core of the work. Through poetic reflection, the collection seeks to capture the complex experience of displacement, resilience, and creative transformation across borders and languages.