P.E.N member Safiye Can (pronounced like John), award-winning and best-selling Circassian poet from Offenbach, is a German citizen. Can studied philosophy, psychoanalysis and law at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main and is the recent recipient of two prestigious literary prizes, the Else Lasker-Schüler Poetry prize and the Alfred-Müller-Felsenburg Prize for Civil Courage in Literature.
Can’s work examining the place of the individual in society reframes concepts of home and belonging. Safiye Can was featured at the 20th annual, week-long Leselenz, Germany’s largest non-urban literary festival in the Black Forest town of Hausach, and was Flagstaff, Arizona’s guest in 2017 as invited honoree of GERMAN CAMPUS WEEKS at Northern Arizona University, funded by the Embassy of the Federal Republic of German, Washington, D.C.
She writes concrete and visual poetry, longpoems and collages and short prose, as well as conducting writing workshops—Poets’ Club—in schools throughout Germany and beyond. She is a board member and co-editor of the renowned German literary journal, die horen as well as curator of the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Zwischenraum-Bibliothek (2019)