A Taxonomy of Silences

16.11.2022 / 19:00 – 21:00
With Anuk Arudpragasam

Eelam Tamil authors Anuk Arudpragasam and Senthuran Varatharajah are friends. But their works are fundamentally different despite being deeply rooted in the philosophy and experience of being Tamil. In a free-flowing discussion with no set time limit, Arudpragasam and Varatharajah will speak about their poetic and philosophical differences and reflect on the very origins of the silence, the most ancient silence, of their texts. Indeed, ruptures, absence, empty spaces, and death are what links their texts.

Anuk Arudpragasam is a novelist writing in English and Tamil and a translator. He received a PhD in philosophy from Columbia University in 2019. Arudpragasam was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize for Up North, his second novel after The Story of a Brief Marriage. He is a 2022 fellow of the Artists-in-Berlin Program.

Senthuran Varatharajah is a writer and philosopher. He studied philosophy, Protestant theology, and comparative religion and cultural studies in Marburg, Berlin, and London. His multi-award-winning debut novel Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen was published in 2016; Varatharajah’s second novel Rot (Hunger) was published in March 2022. His texts explore the relationships between biography, poetology, philosophy, and theology under the conditions of flight, asylum, exile, and genocide.

The conversation will be held in English.

Admission free

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Photo Senthuran Varatharajah: Holm Burgemann
Photo Anuk Arudpragasam: Jasper Kettner