Picador Reading: Speak. Risk. Move.
The Institute for American Studies warmly invites you to the next Picador reading with the current Picador Professor, Hannah Michell, in the Winter Semester 2025/26. The reading will take place on November 25, at 6pm at the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig.
The event "Speak. Risk. Move.” will focus on forms of resistance. We often imagine activism as something loud and visible — marches, speeches and grand acts of defiance. But stories are where power first takes hold: in what is remembered, and in what is erased. To write, then, is to resist forgetting — to contest history itself. In the event, Hannah Michell and host Senthuran Varatharajah invite us to a talk and reading on writing as a site of resistance, and how fiction can expose the struggles over memory and truth.
Hannah Michell was born in England and raised in Seoul. Her first novel, THE DEFECTIONS, was published in France and the UK in 2014 to wide acclaim. Her second novel, EXCAVATIONS (One World, 2023), was named one of the best crime novels of 2023 by LitHub and one of the top ten mysteries of 2023 by Publishers Weekly. She has taught at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and the Dominican University of California.
- The event is in English, open to the public, and free.
The Picador Guest Professorship is brought to you by Leipzig University, American Studies Leipzig, DAAD and Holtzbrinck Berlin. This event is in cooperation with EDIT Magazine.
Register Here
More on the Picador Professorship
The Picador Guest Professorship Picador Guest Professorship for Literature is a public-private partnership between Leipzig University, the DAAD and Holtzbrinck Berlin - Inspire Together. It aims to promote intercultural exchange and make contemporary US American literature visible in Germany.