10 July 18:30–20:00 | Repairing the World through Fiction: Reading and Q&A with Writer Saskya Jain
Moderated by Torsten Jost
Part of the EXC 2020 Annual Conference 2025 "Futures of Doing Literature", 9–11 July 2025.
In a present shaped by colonial legacies, uneven modernities and persistent forms of violence and exclusion – along lines of race, class, religion and gender – what forms of profound and enduring repair work can storytelling imagine across differently situated worlds? Novelist and essayist Saskya Jain engages this question through readings from her work and a discussion of a writer's tools within a fractured and crisis-ridden global landscape. With a distinctive blend of empathy and humor, Jain's novels Fire Under Ash (2014) and Geeta Rahman at Championship Point (2021) explore the layered and often dissonant temporalities that shape the urban experience in New Delhi as a dense archive of memory, rupture and contested futurities. Her fiction traces how lives are affected by intersecting and often conflicting histories while unsettling dominant narratives of progress and belonging. Informed by Saidiya Hartman's notion of "stories as a form of compensation or even as reparations" and grounded in cross-cultural experience, Jain's work opens imaginative spaces for alternative ways of seeing, feeling and relating – across borders, identities and times.
Saskya Jain grew up in New Delhi. Her first novel, Fire Under Ash (Penguin Random House, 2014), was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt Prize. Her second novel, Geeta Rahman at Championship Point (Simon & Schuster, 2021), was nominated for the Times of India AutHer Award and the Tata Literature Live Book of the Year Award. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Intelligent Life, The Economist, The Caravan and Die Zeit, among others. She has taught creative writing and literature at Hong Kong University, Grinnell College and Dartmouth College, and has held writer's residencies at Hedgebrook and Art Omi (USA), Sangam House and Goethe Institut Bangalore (India) and Toji Cultural Centre (South Korea). Jain was Dorothea Schlegel Artist-in-Residence at EXC 2020 from October to December 2024.
Torsten Jost is Head of International Research Cooperation at EXC 2020, where he also conducts postdoctoral research on the epistemic dimensions of spectatorial practices and cultures. He teaches in the Theatre and Performance Studies programme at Freie Universität Berlin and was a guest lecturer at the Shanghai Theatre Academy in 2018. He has co-edited several books on theatre and performance with Erika Fischer-Lichte and others, including The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures (Routledge, 2014), Theatrical Speech Acts (2020), Dramaturgies of Interweaving (2021), Entangled Performance Histories (2023), Performance Cultures as Epistemic Cultures, Vols. I & II (2023) and The Routledge Companion to Performance-Related Concepts in Non-European Languages (2024). Together with Tian Mansha, a prominent performer and director of Chuanju (Sichuan opera), Jost also co-edited the volume Regiekunst heute: Stimmen und Positionen aus China (Alexander, 2018; available in German and Chinese, an English version is in preparation), which explores the diverse practices, pedagogies and philosophies of theatre directing in China. Jost is currently working on his second monograph on spectating as epistemic practice.
Image Credits:
Visual: S. Messner 2025 for EXC 2020 using a photo by Valeria Reverdo on Unsplash.
Profile picture Saskya Jain: David Fischer
Profile picture Torsten Jost: © Christina Stivali / Turboturbo
