The Kurdish Book Club discussed this novel on May 6, 2025.

Cemile Sahin is a Kurdish-German author and multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin. Born in Germany, she works in visual art, literature, and film, exploring state violence and memory. She is known for her film project Four Ballads for my Father, which addresses the GAP project, Turkey’s damming of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in Kurdish areas. All Dogs Die (Alle Hunde Sterben) is her second novel and the first to be translated into English.

The book comprises nine “episodes,” each one focusing on a Kurdish resident of the same fourteen-story tower block (apartment building), located in an unidentified place. The residents have all been subjected in some way to violence and torture by the state, military police, spies.

In each episode, the characters struggle to describe acts of torture and displacement, evoking their harrowing past and the indeterminate present. Characters often recur in several episodes as one another’s neighbors. The same events are mentioned, seen from a different character’s perspective. One narrator will show that another has failed to grasp an aspect of a situation.

The author, who was present for the discussion, explained that her motivation for writing the book was to convey to people in Germany the brutality of the Kurdish experience since the creation of the Turkish republic. All Dogs Dieexpresses the horror of state-sponsored terror and war in words and stories. It novel gives an unflinching representation of real geopolitical situations and the enduring human suffering wrought by state-sponsored terror.

As a multimedia visual artist, Sahin is interested in the interplay between image and text. The novel is interspersed with images that form their own commentary.