Fatbardh Kqiku is a writer and essayist based in Berlin. His work explores growing up between Kosovo and Germany, the aftermath of political violence, and the ways migration, family, and loss shape intimacy and desire. He writes about memory as something carried in the body, and about sexual identity as something formed under conditions of displacement and inheritance. His debut poetry collection, Zwischen den Rissen (Re:sonar Verlag), follows the sudden loss of his father and its impact on how he lives his identity. He is currently working on his second book, in which war and migration appear not as history but as everyday life, in family, in bodies, and in silence. Alongside his literary work, he leads the Sustainable Finance cluster at econsense, the Forum for Sustainable Development of German Business. He holds a BSc in Economics from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and an MSc in Sustainable Finance and Investments from Utrecht University, which he completed cum laude. Borders do not stop at the checkpoint. They run through families, languages, bodies and the spaces where people are allowed to be seen. In this episode of Diasporas Speaking, Berlin-based writer, essayist, and poet Fatbardh Kqiku joins us for a candid conversation on queerness, language, and belonging between Kosovo and Germany. His writing treats memory as something carried in the body, and sexual identity as something formed under conditions of displacement. Drawing on his work, we reflect on grief and coming out, and on how family relationships shift after loss. We explore what Albanian and German each allow him to say, and the silences that remain in both. Together, we look at how state and family shape ideas of the “proper” body and acceptable desire, how those expectations carry across borders, and what it means to be seen as “too ethnic” in some spaces and “too queer” in others. The conversation closes on his second book, in which war and migration appear not as history but as everyday life, in family, in bodies, and in silence, and on the joy now finding its way into his writing.
