Stefan Weidner
Germany
Stefan Weidner was born in Cologne in 1967. He studied Islamic Studies, Philosophy and German Studies in Göttingen, Damascus, Berkeley and Bonn. He now lives in Cologne as a freelance author, translator and literary critic. Weidner was editor-in-chief of Art & Thought/Fikrun wa Fann – a cultural journal published in Arabic, Persian and English that focused on dialogue between Western and Islamic cultures – and has translated and edited numerous collections of Arabic poetry. As an observer of international politics with a focus on the Arab world, he published Ground Zero: 9/11 in 2021, a plea to rethink the world.
In 2024, he published the beautifully designed poetry collection The Arab Diwan, for which he was awarded a Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2026. In it, he brings together poems from the pre-Islamic era that had already inspired Goethe and the Romantics. Weidner has translated them anew into German, thereby making a treasure of world literature accessible to us. In his latest book, Yoga oder die sanfte Eroberung des Westens durch den Osten, Weidner impressively highlights the interactions between European, Middle Eastern and Indian cultures even in times long past.
Yoga oder die sanfte Eroberung des Westens durch den Osten. Hanser 2025
Der arabische Diwan. Die schönsten Gedichte aus vorislamischer Zeit. Translated from Arabic by Stefan Weidner. Die andere Bibliothek 2024
Ground Zero: 9/11 und die Geburt der Gegenwart. Hanser 2021
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