The Thankless Foreigner: A discussion with Irena Brežná

An evening with Irena Brežná on immigration and the search for integration and resistance.

The Platform for Linguistic and Epistemic Justice (PLEJ) is pleased to announce an evening of discussions with Irena Brežná, an award-winning Slovak-Swiss writer and essayist, the author of The Thankless Foreigner, an incisive novel on immigration and the search for integration and resistance.

All welcome.

Irena Brežná is writer and journalist, human rights activist and intercultural mediator, former war journalist. She has won numerous awards including the Theodor Wolff Prize for her portrayal of Chechnya activists. Born in Slovakia, she has been living in Switzerland since 1968, writing mostly in German.

Brežná’s novel The Thankless Foreigner, originally published in 2012 as Die Undankbare Fremde and translated into numerous languages since, including an English version in 2022 (translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp), won both the Swiss Literary Prize and the Dominik Tatarka Award in Slovakia. It is an elegy to the loss of a single place of belonging, dissolved in hybrid identities and many kinds of strangeness. Two poignant and nuanced narrative threads are interwoven in a young immigrant’s search for dignity between assimilation and resistance, showing us that conviviality is attained only if both the receiving communities and the newcomers take steps to reveal their vulnerabilities and emerge from their protective shields.

Julia Sherwood, a multilingual, award-winning translator and literary activist, former human rights worker for Amnesty International and Save the Children, will be Brežná’s discussion partner. Sherwood grew up in Bratislava and studied in Munich and Cologne before settling in London.

Taking inspiration from Brežná’s work, the discussion will centre on multilingual identities and the way they can help us overcome the normativity ingrained in the monocultural illusion still characterising many European societies.

Moderator: Eszter Tarsoly, UCL SSEES

From The Thankless Foreigner:

‘What do you believe in, young lady?’

‘A better world.’

‘Then you’ve come to the right place. Welcome.’