Ronya Othmann - Return to Syria
The event is being held in cooperation with AMICA e.V. This Freiburg-based women’s rights organization supports women and girls in regions affected by war and crisis, currently in Syria, Libya, Ukraine, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Egypt.
“I’ve been back on my cell phone for a few days now. I wake up, I eat, I work without focus, I read the news. I call my father. My father gets up in the morning, reads the news, goes to work, sits in front of the TV. Assad is gone. The regime has fallen. The regime from which my father—a stateless Yazidi Kurd—fled Syria in 1980. I know the country from visits to my grandparents during my childhood. A country where portraits of the dictator and his father hung on every corner, a country ruled by a single family like a mafia clan. For 54 years.”
A few weeks after Assad’s fall, Ronya Othmann traveled to Syria with her father: following in the footsteps of recent events, through a country that seems to have become a stranger to itself. And everywhere she went, she spoke with people of all backgrounds—people who, caught between fear and hope, want to believe in a future once again.
The author discusses her book, her impressions of Syria, and her perspective on the current situation since Assad’s fall with gender studies scholar and board member of the Freiburg-based women’s rights organization AMICA e.V., Dr. Andrea Zimmermann.
*Ronya Othmann, born in Munich in 1993 to a German mother and a Kurdish-Yezidi father, writes poetry, prose, and essays and works as a journalist.
She has received numerous awards for her writing, including the Open Mike Poetry Prize, the MDR Literature Prize, and the Caroline Schlegel Essay Prize.
In 2020, she was awarded the Mara Cassens Prize for *Die Sommer*, her first novel, and in 2021, for the poetry collection *die verbrechen* (2021), she received the Orphil Debut Prize, the Horst Bienek Prize Encouragement Award, and the 2022 Horst Bingel Prize. *Vierundsiebzig, her second novel, was nominated for the German Book Prize and awarded the Düsseldorf Literature Prize, the SWR Best List Prize in 2024, and the Erich Loest Prize in 2025.*
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