In the Other Direction Now

‘…among the most thoughtful intellectual voices in German today.’
The New York Review of Books

‘Navid Kermani has established himself as one of Germany’s foremost public intellectuals.’
The Times Literary Supplement

Kermani’s In the Other Direction Now is a remarkable work of literary non-fiction that follows the author through a vast arc of East Africa, charting the emotional, environmental, and political fault lines that define the region.

On a journey from southern Madagascar to Sudan, via the Comoros, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia, Navid Kermani finds people and cultures in flux, often fleeing war and drought. In Madagascar, he witnesses the dramatic effects of the first climate-related famine, the once fertile land appearing like an abandoned mine littered only with the stumps of trees. In northern Ethiopia he meets fighters of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, participants in a brutal and senseless war that has claimed half a million lives.

By turns fought over and forgotten, the regions through which Kermani travels have been ravaged by conquest and economic exploitation; today China and the West compete for scarce resources, and the Arab north carries its religion and culture southwards, often by force. But, from personal encounters and conversations on the road, Kermani finds reasons for hope. Music emerges as a unifying thread, for example, and Christian hymns, Sufi dances, and Sudanese jazz become symbols of resilience and transformation that bind communities across conflict, faith, and time.

In the Other Direction Now is a work of great human depth about a region from which Europe’s gaze is too often averted.

Navid Kermani is one of Germany’s foremost public thinkers. His many awards include the Kleist Prize, the Joseph Breitbach Prize, the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and, most recently, the Thomas Mann Prize.

Tony Crawford is a translator based in Berlin. His translations have been shortlisted for the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize (Goethe-Institut, New York) in 2017 and 2022. Crawford’s translation of Navid Kerman’s Wonder Beyond Belief won the 2018 Schlegel-Tieck Prize (Translators Association/Society of Authors, London).