Jessica Mawuena Lawson: Kekeli

In the organizer's words:

Kekeli lives in a small town in southern Germany. Her life is uniform and conformist until her inscrutable cousin Afi from Togo comes to visit and Kekeli suddenly finds herself confronted with many questions of belonging. She is also invited by her classmate Kwame to work on a documentary film about the lives of black people in Germany for the "Pamoja Society", a group of creative, Afro-German young people, and to travel to Berlin to do so.
On a road trip with Afi, Kwame and his brother Kofi, Kekeli discovers an oppressive family secret that throws her off course. And all this while she falls more and more in love with Kwame.
In her unique and clear language, Jessica Mawuena Lawson tells the family story of her bright and likeable protagonist Kekeli and invites her readers to get carried away by the Pamoja Society and be inspired by Afrobeats and poetry.

Jessica Lawson, born in 1997, lives in southern Germany, works in a refugee shelter and studies literature and cultural theory. After her traineeship at Arena Verlag, she also works as a freelance sensitivity reader and editor. "KekeIi" is her debut novel. Like the protagonist, she also has a German-Togolese background. Jessica Mawuena Lawson wishes there were more books from the perspective of black people in Germany.