Şehnaz Dost is a freelance author living in Cologne. In 2024, she published her debut novel “ruh,” which was honored by New Books in German. After studying German language and literature comparative literature, and media culture analysis, Şehnaz Dost began writing prose in 2019 and received the Cologne Literature Days‘ sponsorship award in the same year. Her work has been recognized with scholarships from the Literary Colloquium Berlin, the Künstler*dorf Schöppingen, the Kunststiftung NRW, and the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia, among others. In her work, she deals with disruption: what does not fit, how to respond to it, and the question of gentleness.
“Where something is hidden, there is usually also an overlap, a fold. That’s why I’m interested in dichotomies in my prose. At the moment, I’m preoccupied with human experience in nature on the one hand and in the metropolis on the other. Both can have similar effects on the perception of time. I wanted to explore this idea in Schöppingen and shape it into a narrative. Through interdisciplinary exchange with the other fellows and the synergies made possible by workshops and Künstler*dorf’s Summer School, further ideas have joined my project. During my residency, I began translating parts of my novel “ruh,” written in German, into Turkish, thereby opening up new levels of language use for myself.”