Spoken Acts: Miedya Mahmod und Esra Canpalat | Ruhrtriennale 2025

Young word art between poetry and prose

The two Ruhr area authors Miedya Mahmod and Esra Canpalat present their own texts together and talk about their approaches to authorship.

Miedya Mahmod, born and living in the Ruhr area, has been working with paper & stage poetry since 2016, writing short prose, long poems & everything in between. They is part of the post-German collective parallelgesellschaft. They is co-editor of LytterZine, the first illustrated magazine for poetry on Twitter (r.i.p.) by users for users, & participated in the first German-language poetry retreat on spoken word at the Hausacher LeseLenz literature festival. In 2024 Mahmod was represented with an installation in the exhibition KÖRPER:SPRACHEN (Burg Hülshoff) & house artist of the Center for Literature. Narrowly eliminated from this year's Ingeborg Bachmann Competition, they were recently awarded the Förderpreis Ruhr.

Esra Canpalat is an author and literary scholar from the Ruhr region. From a transcultural position, she writes stories, essays, academic articles and texts on art and cultural mediation. She is interested in autofiction, documentation and remembrance. Canpalat is the winner of the Ruhr 2021 Prize and was honored in the literary competition 60 Years of Migration from Turkey - New Hopes. She is currently working on a novel with the working title Sesler. Voices. Her column Vom Rande aus appears online at interkultur.ruhr.

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The Ruhrtriennale is the festival of the arts in the Ruhr region - a celebration for all those who yearn for tomorrow. Touching experiences of music theater, drama, dance and more are created between machine halls and blast furnaces.