Lin Hierse

Lin Hierse is a prolific author, journalist, poet, and public intellectual. With a background in Asian Studies and Human Geography, she is a longtime contributor to several major German journals and periodicals; she wrote the biweekly column “Poetical Correctness” in taz from 2020-2023. Her acclaimed autofictional debut novel Wovon wir träumen [What We Dream Of] was published in 2022 and follows the interconnected stories of three generations of women whose lives are ruptured and reunited through the experience of migration and life in the Chinese diaspora. It was followed in 2024 by her sophomore novel Das Verschwinden der Welt [The Disappearing World], a novel that chronicles the life of an aging tenement building in the outskirts of Shanghai: a one-time refuge for peasants from the Chinese countryside, it later became home to Jewish refugees during WW2, and new urban milieu following the Cultural Revolution, before falling into forgetfulness and disrepair with the rapid gentrification of the 21st-century city. A translation of her short story, “KTV Girl” appeared in the recent English-language anthology Berlin Babel. (Photo Credit: Amelie Kahn-Ackermann)