Samira El Ouassil

Samira El Ouassil is a journalist and actress. She earned a degree in communication studies from Ludwig–Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich. She writes for Der Spiegel and Deutschlandfunk. In 2024, she served as artistic director of the German Film Award and as a trusted representative for the Kleist Prize. Together with Friedemann Karig, she co-hosts the pirate radio station Powerplay, which blends political theory, narrative analysis, and pop culture to generate diagnoses of the present. Out of this context emerged the bestseller Erzählende Affen (Narrating Monkeys).

During her stay in Los Angeles, Samira El Ouassil will be working on a book project that examines the climate crisis as a historically evolved crisis of narratives, in which knowledge, power, ideology, and cultural narrative forms are fatally intertwined.

Selected Awards
2022 | Shortlisted for German Non-Fiction Prize of the Stiftung Buchkultur und Leseförderung des Börsenvereins des Deutschen Buchhandels for Erzählende Affen. Mythen, Lügen, Utopien – Wie Geschichten unser Leben bestimmen
2021 | Cultural Journalist of the Year, medium magazin
2020 | Bert-Donnepp-Preis – German Prize for Media Journalism from the Verein der Freunde des Adolf-Grimme-Preises

Selected Publications
2023 | “Wie ich lernte, Barbie (nicht) zu lieben.” Essay. In: Übermedien (awarded the FAZ’s Michael-Althen-Preis)
2021 | with Friedemann Karig. Erzählende Affen. Mythen, Lügen, Utopien – Wie Geschichten unser Leben bestimmen. Berlin: Ullstein (revised paperback edition, 2023)
2016 | ed., with Tilman Ezra Mühlenberg, Martin Martin Schlesinger, and Timon Karl Kaleyta. Die 100 wichtigsten Dinge. Berlin: Hatje Cantz.