Set in the charged atmospheres of Kreuzberg, airports, waiting rooms, bedrooms, and prayer spaces, Prinzenbad moves through hunger, desire, surveillance, inheritance, and the everyday violence of being read as ‘foreign’. Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç writes in a shifting, multilingual music where German, Turkish, Arabic, and English collide and braid, refusing the neat borders that states, headlines, and even poems try to enforce.
 
These poems carry family voices and childhood textures, but they also burn with queer tenderness and defiance. A public swimming pool becomes a site of longing; a passport control becomes a theatre of suspicion; a phone screen becomes both intimacy and distance. Throughout, language is not just medium but battleground, a place to reclaim the body, the name, the right to speak, and the right to be misunderstood on your own terms.
 
A collection of fierce lyric agility and emotional heat, Prinzenbad insists on life in the margins as a centre of gravity.
 
ABOUT Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç & Özgecan Kesici-Ayoubi:
Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç is a political scientist and writer. His debut poetry collection Prinzenbad was published by Elif Verlag in 2022, followed by Muslimaniac. Die Karriere eines Feindbildes by Verbrecher Verlag in 2023. His writing has been widely published and translated into several languages. He was nominated for the Clemens Brentano Prize and the Dresden Poetry Prize, and was awarded the Wolfgang Weyrauch Prize. In 2025, his debut novel Hundesohn was published by Suhrkamp, for which he was awarded the ZDF aspekte Literature Prize.
 
Özgecan Kesici-Ayoubi is a writer, translator, and poet whose work has appeared in Banshee Press, Poetry Ireland Review, and Gorse, among others. She is the recipient of the Irish Arts Council Bursary Award in Literature and the Berlin Senate Work Stipend for Literature. She is the co-host of the Our Nomadic Lives podcast and holds a PhD in Sociology from University College Dublin.