Jina Khayyer's In the Heart of the Cat Longlisted for the German Book Prize
News18.08.2025
We are pleased to announce that Jina Khayyer’s novel In the Heart of the Cat is among the 20 books longlisted for the 2025 German Book Prize.
The prize is awarded every year at the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair by the Foundation for Book Culture and Reading Promotion of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association and honours the best German-language novel of the year, while also aiming to draw international attention to German-language authors, reading, and contemporary literature.
The winner of the prize receives €25,000, while the other five shortlisted authors each receive €2,500. The six shortlisted authors only learn who among them has won the German Book Prize on the evening of the award ceremony.
The shortlist will be announced on September 16, and the German Book Prize 2025 will be awarded on October 13.
Khayyer’s novel is a stunning and uplifting novel set against the backdrop of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran.
Written in glittering prose enriched by both the poetic force of the Persian language and the warmth of family bonds and rituals that only grow brighter against the dark backdrop of loss and trauma, this book is ultimately a story of unshakeable dignity and empowerment, of taking ownership of one’s own history and of history as such. In In the Heart of the Cat, Jina Khayyer radically and emphatically redefines for herself what is woman, what is life, what is freedom.
»Through the stories of three generations of Iranian women, Jina Khayyer questions the notions of exile, inheritance and emancipation. Without Manichaeism and with a powerful breath, she gives life to the Iranian women of yesterday and today, caught up as they are in the follies of History.« Leïla Slimani
The prize is awarded every year at the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair by the Foundation for Book Culture and Reading Promotion of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association and honours the best German-language novel of the year, while also aiming to draw international attention to German-language authors, reading, and contemporary literature.
The winner of the prize receives €25,000, while the other five shortlisted authors each receive €2,500. The six shortlisted authors only learn who among them has won the German Book Prize on the evening of the award ceremony.
The shortlist will be announced on September 16, and the German Book Prize 2025 will be awarded on October 13.
Khayyer’s novel is a stunning and uplifting novel set against the backdrop of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran.
Written in glittering prose enriched by both the poetic force of the Persian language and the warmth of family bonds and rituals that only grow brighter against the dark backdrop of loss and trauma, this book is ultimately a story of unshakeable dignity and empowerment, of taking ownership of one’s own history and of history as such. In In the Heart of the Cat, Jina Khayyer radically and emphatically redefines for herself what is woman, what is life, what is freedom.
»Through the stories of three generations of Iranian women, Jina Khayyer questions the notions of exile, inheritance and emancipation. Without Manichaeism and with a powerful breath, she gives life to the Iranian women of yesterday and today, caught up as they are in the follies of History.« Leïla Slimani