Quiet Flows The River

What is it that makes rivers so special? Why do they play such a strong role in the personal, cultural and artistic imagination? In the first edition of Salon Weißensee, we welcome three writers to Galerie Arnarson & Sehmer to talk rivers and literature while sharing their own river-inspired works.

Faruk Šehić was born in 1970 in Bihać, in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Until the outbreak of war in 1992, he studied veterinary medicine. However, the then 22-year-old voluntarily joined the army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which he led a unit of 130 men. Literary critics have hailed Šehić as the leader of the ‘mangled generation’ of writers born in the 1970s Yugoslavia, and his books have achieved cult status with readers across the whole region. His debut novel Quiet Flows the Una (Knjiga o Uni, 2011) was published in English by Istros Books, who will also publish his forthcoming poetry collection My Rivers.

Kate McNaughton was born and raised in Paris by British parents, which left her culturally confused but usefully multilingual. She now lives in Berlin. Her first novel, How I Lose You, was published in 2018 by Doubleday in the UK and Les Escales in France. She is now working on her second, also to be published by Doubleday. Kate is also a translator (from French, German, Italian and English into English or French) and a filmmaker with several documentary films under her belt.

Paul Scraton was born in the north of England and has lived in Berlin since 2002. His first book was the short essay An Idea of a River (Readux Books) and he has gone on to publish a number of books including Built on Sand (Influx Press). His work has been translated into German, Polish and Italian, and his next novel A Dream of White Horses will be published by Bluemoose Books in 2024.