In the organizer's words:

The novel ë tells of the Kosovo war and recalls the suffering of families who lost their homeland, whose murdered relatives were buried anonymously and are still missing or unidentified today. A past that cannot pass because it is literally in every fiber of the body is brought up by Jehona Kicaj in the truest sense of the word.

The unusual title ë stands for a letter that has an important function in the Albanian language, although it is not usually pronounced. As the child of refugees from Kosovo, the narrator is in search of a language and a voice. She grows up in Germany, goes to kindergarten, school and university, searches for understanding, but repeatedly encounters attributions, cluelessness and ignorance. When the Kosovo war raged at the end of the 1990s, she experienced it from a safe distance. But war and death are also present in the diaspora - they are just experienced differently than on the ground.

Jehona Kicaj, born in Kosovo in 1991 and raised in Göttingen, studied Philosophy, German Studies and Modern German Literature in Hanover. After academic publications, she has also been publishing literary texts since 2020. She is co-editor of the anthology "Und so blieb man eben für immer". Guest workers and their children (2023). The novel ë is her debut and was nominated for the most important German literary prize, the German Book Prize, in 2025.

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