MQ Writer-in-Residence Ronya Othmann: Vierundsiebzig
Reading

Tue 12.08., 19h | MQ Summer Stage, Main Courtyard
Free entry

Author Ronya Othmann, who is living and working at the MQ in July and August 2025 as part of the MQ Writer-in-Residence programme, talks to freelance literary critic Tino Schlench about her novel ‘Vierundsiebzig’.

"I have seen. The self is a witness. It speaks, and yet it has no language." This is how Ronya Othmann describes the process of storytelling in her new novel. She wants to find a form for the unspeakable, the genocide of the Yazidi population, the seventy-fourth, perpetrated by IS fighters in Shingal in 2014. Seventy-four is a journey to the origins, to the crime scenes. The journey leads to the camps and the front lines, to the living rooms of relatives and on to a Yezidi village in Turkey where no one lives today. It is about looking, listening, bearing witness, interweaving images and reports with one's own history, with a life as a journalist and author in Germany. 

"Ronya Othmann creates a work of immense density, necessary clarity and rigour, a radically poetic form of documentary storytelling. Her voice is one of diaspora, which also leaves deep traces in the reader."

Ronya Othmann, born in Munich in 1993 to a German mother and a Kurdish-Ezidi father, writes poetry, prose and essays and works as a journalist. She has been honoured many times for her writing, including the Open Mike Poetry Prize, the MDR Literature Prize and the Caroline Schlegel Prize for Essay Writing. She was awarded the Mara Cassens Prize in 2020 for Die Sommer, her first novel, and the Orphil Debut Prize, the Horst Bienek Prize and the Horst Bingel Prize in 2022 for her poetry collection die verbrechen (2021). Vierundsiebzig, her second novel, was nominated for the German Book Prize and honoured with the Düsseldorf Literature Prize in 2024 and the Erich Loest Prize in 2025.

Tino Schlench, born in Prenzlau (Uckermark) in 1983, studied Modern German Literature and Cultural Studies in Leipzig, Berlin and Vienna. He is a freelance critic and editor, blogger with a focus on the literatures of Central and Eastern Europe and curator of the literature programme at the Kultursommer Wien festival. In 2025, his story ‘Schulweg, 1998’ was published in the anthology "Eins, zwei, drei, wir. Was Gemeinschaft kann", edited by Martha Schoknecht, published by Diogenes Verlag.

The reading is organised in cooperation with the Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs (BMEIA). Since 2010, the MQ has been inviting international writers to Vienna in cooperation with the BMEIA to live and work for two months in a studio apartment on the MQ premises. The MQ Residency enables the authors to network with the Austrian literary scene.

Image material: © Rowohlt Verlag