On 9 January 2019, Sharon Dodua Otoo and Olivia Wenzel will talk face-to-face about being a woman and being black in Germany.

In the Face to Face series of the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden, two authors meet and discuss their works. Each guest presents his or her own text passages and has read the other's current book. The tandems are arranged according to intersections in the texts of the two authors. A frequently recurring motif is the literary examination of the theme of origin - geographical, social, religious and cultural - and the shaping of the present and future that is predetermined by it. The result is a dialogue about new German literature in which the two authors of the evening have the threads in their own hands, face-to-face.

Sharon Dodua Otoo was born in London in 1972 and now lives in Berlin. She is a Black Briton, mother, activist, author and publisher of the English-language book series Witnessed in the edition assemblage. She understands "schwarz" as a political term and therefore writes it with a capital S. Her first novella die dinge, die ich denke, während ich höflich lächle was published in English in 2012 and in German in 2013. It was followed by Synchronicity, in German translation in 2014, and as the original story in English in 2015. In 2016 she won the Bachmann Prize with her satirical text Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin, in which a breakfast egg dares to rebel. She is currently writing her first novel.

Olivia Wenzel, born in 1985 in Weimar, lives in Berlin. She writes texts for the stage and texts for silent reading, makes music as OTIS FOULIE and is active as a performer - most recently in the play Die Erfindung der Gertraud Stock with the collective vorschlag:hammer. Olivia Wenzel's texts for spoken theatre have been performed at the Münchner Kammerspiele, the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the Deutsches Theater Berlin and the Ballhaus Naunynstraße, among others. With prose texts, she has been a guest at the international literature festival berlin and at Prosanova - Festival for Young German-Language Contemporary Literature, among others. Her debut novel will be published by S. Fischer Verlag in 2019.

The event starts at 7:00 pm. Further information can be found here.