On Ghosts, Queerness and Patriarchy – Reading and Discussion of Geisterdämmerung with author Kevin Chen and translator Monika Li

 

Together with the Heidelberg international literature festival feeLit, the Taiwan Lecture Series and the Worldmaking Project organized a reading and discussion with Taiwanese-German author Kevin Chen (Chen Shih-Hung 陳思宏).

Kevin Chen's novel Guicheng 鬼城, translated into German as Geisterdämmerung ("Twilight of the Ghosts") in the 2025 translation with Matthes&Seitz (https://www.matthes-seitz-berlin.de/buch/geisterdaemmerung-ebook.html), traces the lives and dreams of several Taiwanese and German characters in a world full of friendship and violence, desire and suppression, secrets and exposures, tradition and change: Having served a sentence for killing his German husband, the young Taiwanese man Tianhong returns to his home village in rural Taiwan during Taiwan's Ghost Festival. His return stirs the living and the dead and brings up memories, dreams and emotions that have long been buried. It is a mosaic of rural and urban Taiwanese and German societies, of struggles and searches that reach across cultures and times.

The reading thus offered the audience glimpses into the many different stories in which cultures, peoples and worlds become inextricably entangled, and in particular the opportunity to listen to Chen Shih-hungs life experience as someone who is going back and forth between Taiwan and Germany. Given that the author already has a growing international reputation, but this is his first novel to have been translated into German, the event was not least also an impulse for German readers to explore deeper the fictional and factual storyworlds of a multifaceted Taiwanese author.