As part of the Queer Literature Festival Munich, Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç will be reading from his long-awaited debut novel "Hundesohn", which has just been awarded the "aspekte" literary prize.

"Baba always says, bir lisan, bir insan. İki lisan, iki insan. One language, one person. Two languages, two people. That means the more languages you speak, the bigger the world is, the more you are." The world that Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç's debut novel Hundesohn roams through is polyphonic and large. The text unrolls like a carpet, "a moving world, a wandering floor", over which a dizzying roundelay of encounters and transgressions passes, always to the rhythm of Grindr notifications. The narrator Zeno has in common with Franz Kafka, who is his godfather from the very first page, in that he does not master a tongue, but wrestles with many. To name but a few, there is the German in which he writes; the Turkish in which he remained a child; the English into which he repeatedly switches - and the gap left by his grandparents' language. Language, linguistic confusion and desire are inextricably intertwined here: Zeno's favorite thing is Hassan's "cool tongue in my mouth after we've eaten watermelon".

Hundesohn powerfully breaks free from the leash of the coming-of-age story. Readers will not find a line that runs unbroken from an earlier self to a present self, but a narrator who inhabits different spaces and temporalities at the same time. And they find a hungry mouth that makes itself the site of many tongues because it has outgrown its own tongue.

Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç, born in 1989, is a political scientist, freelance writer and poet. His poetry debut Prinzenbad was published by Elif Verlag in 2022, followed in 2023 by the non-fiction book Muslimaniac. On the career of an enemy (Criminal). He was nominated for the Clemens Brentano Prize and the Dresden Poetry Prize and was awarded the Wolfgang Weyrauch Prize in 2025. Hundesohn, his first novel, was published by Suhrkamp in September 2025.