Soleiman Adel Guemar was born and raised in Algiers where he worked as a journalist. He published numerous stories and won two national poetry prizes. In 2002 he left Algeria to seek safety for himself and his family in the UK. 'Sate of Emergency', a representative selection of Guemar's poetry, is rooted in Algerian experience, speaking of urgent concerns everywhere - oppression, resistance, state violence, traumas and private dreams. His poetry sings of life's sensual pleasures in the face of the grotesque morbidity of violent political repression. In the excellent translation by Tom...

Zafer Senocak is the most prominent and versatile German Turkish writer today. A prize-winning poet, translator, editor, political and philosophical essayist, and fiction writer, Senocak is the most challenging voice of the Turkish population in united Germany. His stylish and provocative essays explore taboo and repressed aspects of relations between Occident and Orient, Europe and Islam. His fiction has won him international acclaim, especially the post-unification novel "Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft "(1998), which deals with the German-Jewish-Turkish-Armenian complex. But poetry is always at...

Feridun Zaimoglu made a spectacular entrance onto the German cultural scene in 1995 with Kanak Sprak: a volume of incendiary texts based on interviews with disaffected Turkish German youths, using an invented, stylized literary language, a hybrid of multiple varieties of German with a hip hop beat. A prolific and acclaimed novelist, dramatist, newspaper columnist, visual artist and live performer, Zaimoglu has remained in the public eye through controversy and reinvention. His more recent work appropriates German literary traditions in radically new ways, adapting Romantic styles,...

"German Text Crimes "offers new perspectives on scandals and legal actions implicating writers of German literature since the 1950s. Topics range from literary echoes of the "Heidegger Affair" to recent incitements to murder businessmen (agents of American neo-liberal power) in works by Rolf Hochhuth and others. GDR songwriters' cat-and-mouse games with the Stasi; feminist debates on pornography, around works by Charlotte Roche and Elfriede Jelinek; controversies over anti-Semitism, around Bernhard Schlink's "Der Vorleser / The Reader "and Martin Walser's lampooning of the Jewish critic...