Maryam Aras reads from "Dinosaur Child" (2025)
in cooperation with the Literature Office of Western Lower Saxony
Wednesday, May 20, 2026, 7 p.m. – Kunstraum hase29
During a film screening, Maryam Aras spots her father on the cinema screen. He is sitting on the floor among other students at a protest against the Shah's visit to Berlin in 1967. For her, it is the beginning of a search for traces – of her childhood in the Iranian diaspora in Cologne, the certainty that her father cannot travel to Iran, and the story of his and her politicization.
In this literary essay, Maryam Aras writes her father's political biography, weaving together narrative threads from the 1953 coup in Iran and a transnational 1968 movement to the working-class Cologne district of Mülheim and a family history in which the luxury of apolitical living never existed. By illuminating erased history within both the Iranian diaspora and German historiography, Dinosaur Child enables a multi-perspective understanding of our political present.
Maryam Aras was born in Cologne in 1982, where she studied Islamic Studies, English Studies, and Political Science. She writes literary criticism, essays, and academic works, and examines, from a critical perspective on power dynamics, patterns of reception in German-language cultural journalism, feminist Persian-language literature, and postcolonial analyses of German perceptions of Iran. She received a working grant from the Arts Foundation of North Rhine-Westphalia for her project *Dinosaurierkind* (Dinosaur Child). In 2025, she was awarded the Kurt Tucholsky Prize.
Moderated by Dr. Jens Peters, head of the Literature Office of Western Lower Saxony.
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