Poetic Islam, Islamic Poetry?

“Whoever erases the Islamic from this poetry erases the poetic in Islam”, writes the author and award-winning poet Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç in his highly acclaimed book Muslimaniac (2023). Keskinkılıç deals academically and artistically with issues such as anti-Muslim racism, Orientalism, and the influence of European-Islamic history on contemporary cultural production. In his poetry debut Prinzenbad (2022), Muslim spirituality, memories, and queer desire form the literary coordinate system for a journey through alternative geographies.

On 3 June 2025, he will read poems as part of the exhibition The European Koran at the Weltmuseum Wien and engage in a conversation with Muhammet Ali Bas (requested).

Dr Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç (*1989) is a political scientist, freelance author and poet. He studied in Vienna, Berlin and Cambridge, and he teaches and undertakes research at universities in Berlin. In 2023, Muslimaniac. Die Karriere eines Feindbildes was published by Verbrecher Verlag. In 2025, he was awarded his doctorate at Humboldt University of Berlin with a thesis on Muslimische Existenzkünste. In addition to academic texts, Keskinkılıç writes columns, essays, prose, radio plays and poetry. In 2022, his debut collection of poetry, Prinzenbad, was published by Elif Verlag, earning him nominations for the Clemens Brentano Prize and the Dresden Poetry Prize. His poems are translated into various languages, including English, French, Italian and Kazakh, and have been featured as part of multimedia art exhibitions at the Grassi Museum in Leipzig, at the Literaturpassage in Vienna and most recently at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. In 2025, he was awarded the Wolfgang Weyrauch Scholarship. His debut novel is set to be published by Suhrkamp in the autumn of this year.

Duration: 90 min.
To participate in the event, all guests need a valid museum ticket (or an annual ticket, a KHMembership or a membership of the Weltmuseum Wien Friends).
Registration:  online (limited number of participants)
Meeting point: WMW Forum