Literatur auf der Insel / Gast: Katerina Poladjan

In the organizer's words:

Café ADA
Literature on the island
The literary salon at Café Ada
Guest: Katerina Poladjan
Host: Torsten Krug & Uta Atzpodien
Friday / July 03, 2026 / 7:30 pm (admission from 5 pm)
Admission: 12/6 (VVK incl. fees) and 14/8 (B.O.)

Free admission for visitors under the age of 21. Please send us a short message to post@insel.news if you are interested.

Award-winning author Katerina Poladjan uses intense images to depict existential experiences in her cleverly constructed novel "Goldstrand". It reads "easily, even cheerfully", according to Christoph Schröder in SWR, which is due to "the tone of voice, the sparkling dialogs" that the sixty-year-old director Eli has with Dottoresa, his therapist in Rome. In the 1950s, a vacation resort was built on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast: Goldstrand, a place in the sun. Eli was conceived here. On the couch, he tells his family story, which became a European odyssey through an entire century.
In the film that opens the novel, Eli tells the story of his grandfather Lew, his father Felix and his aunt Vera. According to Eli in the book, it is complicated to leave exactly the right thing behind. Here, Katerina Poladyan shows herself to be a master of omission, comparing her approach to writing to that of a painter, as she "uses the right contours to make something three-dimensional that would fall flat again with an excess of detail."
Felix was one of the master builders of the large-scale socialist "Goldstrand" project in Bulgaria. Inflamed by the new left in the 1950s, Eli's mother returns to Rome pregnant after a night with Felix. Her father, a Mussolini supporter, throws her out.
"Goldstrand" is a book of bright utopias, a narrative of Eli's life, a narrative about his life. We are looking forward to the evening with Katerina Poladjan and her impressively clever novel.

"Ada" is Turkish and means "island".
The guests at "Literature on the Island" are renowned authors from Germany and abroad. They read from their books, talk about their work and bring along foreign texts and music that are important to them. After a break, the evening's themes can be explored in greater depth through photos, music, a film or in a free discussion.
The hosts are the theater director and author Torsten Krug and the freelance dramaturge Dr. Uta Atzpodien. The mentor of the event is the Wuppertal writer and former publishing director Hermann Schulz.

An INSEL event.

Price information:

Admission: 12/6 (VVK incl. fees) and 14/8 (B.O.)