Abbas Khider has been named Mainz City Writer of the Year 2017. Khider, who was born in Baghdad in 1973 and currently lives in Berlin, is the 33rd recipient of this prestigious literary award.

Abbas Khider knows all about repression, flight and expulsion, homelessness and hopes for a new life. According to the jury of the Mainz City Writer Award, the German-Iraqi author, who has written in German from the outset, uses musical and concise language to tell tragicomic, harrowing, and moving stories of people who have suffered persecution and displacement. With sensitivity, humor, and sympathy, he gives the homeless an authentic, unmistakable voice.

Khider grew up in Baghdad's "Saddam City" district as the son of a date merchant. As a high school graduate, he was arrested for political activities against Saddam Hussein's regime and imprisoned and tortured from 1993 to 1995. After fleeing Iraq, he sought asylum in Germany in 2000. From 2005 to 2010, he studied literature and philosophy in Munich and Potsdam. Khider has been a German citizen since 2007.

In his debut novel, Der falsche Inder (The False Indian, 2008), he processed his years-long odyssey as a refugee. This was followed in 2011 by the novel Die Orangen des Präsidenten (The President's Oranges), in which Khider painted a harrowing picture of Iraq between prison hell and a sheltered childhood idyll. In "Brief in die Auberginenrepublik" (Letter to the Eggplant Republic, 2013), Khider created a polyphonic panorama of Arab conditions and voices while following a letter's journey from exile to his Iraqi homeland. In 2014, Khider led a writing workshop in Cairo, having already conducted research in the Egyptian capital in 2011 and participated in the protests against the Mubarak regime.

In 2016, his latest novel, Ohrfeige (Slap), was published, once again immediately attracting considerable attention from critics and readers alike. With a sense of melancholy and the grotesque, Khider describes how a group of asylum seekers in the early 2000s get caught up in the machinery of an absurd German bureaucracy.

Marianne Grosse, head of the cultural department, said of Khider's selection: "With his much-discussed book 'Ohrfeige', Abbas Khider offers a completely different perspective on the diverse portrayals of refugee movements that have long been a topic of discussion in Europe, and especially in Germany. In this case, however, from the perspective of those affected, who often seem to be denied the chance to finally arrive after incredible journeys and efforts... Khider gives the reader a deep insight into the labyrinth of the German asylum authorities and describes the pitfalls and hurdles there with wit and a deliberately harsh tone. The author thus makes an important, literarily very gripping contribution to the current situation from a completely different perspective and broadens the prevailing field of vision. We have been able to win a very exciting author for the city writer's office in Mainz!"

Abbas Khider has received numerous awards, including

• the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize (2010),
• the Hilde Domin Prize for Literature in Exile (2013),
• the Nelly Sachs Prize of the City of Dortmund (2013), and
• the Spycher Literature Prize Leuk 2016.

Like his predecessors Clemens Meyer, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Judith Schalansky, Khider will produce a documentary on a topic of his choice in collaboration with ZDF and move into the completely renovated city writer's apartment in the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz.

The award ceremony for the prize, which is endowed with 12,500 euros, took place on March 7, 2017.