WELTKLANG – Nacht der Poesie

In the organizer's words:

Betonhalle | 15/10 € incl. anthology

This summer, we are celebrating a Night of Poetry in Berlin for the 25th time. The first edition, which took place at Potsdamer Platz in 2000, is reported in the annals of the capital's press to have taken place in the middle of a summer cold, it had become far too dark to read along in the anthology, and yet an enthusiastic audience held out until two o'clock in the morning.

Unlike that mythical founding night at the turn of the millennium, Weltklang now has more than just warm rooms and reading lamps. Since 2023, German and English translations of all the poems read have been published in an anthology traditionally published exclusively for the event.

The eight poets performing on this evening from different parts of the world will read and perform in their respective original languages and show the intensity that poetry can generate not only in silent reading, but also in the spoken word, in the concentration of a poetic voice.

Anneke Brassinga (born 1948 in Schaarsbergen, Netherlands) is one of the most renowned voices in contemporary Dutch poetry and has been awarded the P.C. Hooft Prize. She came to writing through translating Beckett, Diderot, Nabokov and Plath, among others. In her poems, the "language magician" (Rob Schouten) Brassinga brings language to life in its materiality and traces the essence of things and the "beating heart of the text" in idiosyncratic new word creations and composites.

Kayo Chingonyi (born 1987 in Zambia) has lived in the UK since 1993. The poems in his volumes "Kumukanda", which won the Dylan Thomas Prize, and "A Blood Condition" (Chatto and Windus 2017 and 2021 respectively) approach poetic rites of passage. They are tied back to the history and mythology of their own culture of origin and at the same time shaped by growing up in the UK, by hip hop, pop culture and rap, by personal and collective experiences of loss.

CAConrad's(born 1966 in Kansas, USA) poems emerge from (soma)tic poetry rituals that follow precise guidelines such as: watching the sunrise worldwide via webcams, meditating to field recordings of extinct animal species, wearing or eating only one color for seven days. The poems that emerge from these rituals detach themselves from the capitalist logic of exploitation and create their poetics from a radical outsider position. They are an invitation to heal together and to "love the world as it is, not as it was".

Fatemeh Ekhtesari (born 1986 in Kashmar, Iran) fled Iran in 2015 and has lived in Norway since 2017. She belongs to the "Postmodern Ghasel", the most radical poetic movement in contemporary Iranian literature. In her poems, she updates traditional forms of Persian poetry such as the ghasele in the context of the socially and politically violent present in her home country, alternating between colloquial and high tone.

Hwang Yuwon (born 1982 in Ulsan, South Korea) has published four volumes of poetry that have won numerous prizes. His poems are hyper-realistic wanderings between the grotesque and discourse. Hwang himself calls them "real time poems": live entanglements of inside and outside. Rhythm and repetition form a thread on which poetic images hang, oscillate and collide. A selection of Hwang's poetry was published in English by Vagabond Press in 2019. He himself translates Anne Carson, Bob Dylan and William Carlos Williams, among others, into Korean.

Sylvie Kandé (born 1957 in Paris, France), is of Breton-Senegalese origin and teaches African history in the USA. She was awarded the Prix Louise-Labé in 2017, among others. Her poems follow the very contemporary ghosts of colonialism, reworking or re-imagining the mythological and historical. Kandé's texts are narrative, erudite and dense, mysterious and clear at the same time. Everything remembered and related, everything personal and political is transformed into a sensual, dazzling, yet precise language.

Marianna Kijanowska (born 1973 in Shovkva, Lviv Oblast, Ukraine) has written over a dozen volumes of poetry. "Бабин Яр." is published in German. Голосами" ("Babyn Jar. Voices"), which was awarded the Taras Shevchenko Prize in 2020 and published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2024, Kiyanovska writes poems that expose themselves to the horrors of history and the wars of the present, and yet have the strength to remain open to tenderness and hope: "it means I can sleep on your chest / I can sleep without fear / it means this is still possible".

Miruna Vlada (born 1986 in Bucharest, Romania) published her first book at the age of 18, sparking a public debate in her home country about so-called "female" writing. Since then, three further volumes have followed, including the multi-award-winning "Bosnia. Partaj" (Cartea Românească 2014) and "Prematur" (Cartier 2021). Vlada's poems have been translated into 14 languages. They are highly political, very provocative texts about the consequences of the civil war in Bosnia, the "unquenchable inner bleeding of our society" and the right not to have children.

With: Anneke Brassinga, Kayo Chingonyi, CAConrad, Fatemeh Ekhtesari, Hwang Yuwon, Sylvie Kandé, Marianna Kijanowska, Miruna Vlada

Presented by Ali Abdollahi, Juri Andruchowytsch, Suah Bae, Alexandru Bulucz, Oswald Egger, Zoncy Heavenly, Lisa Jeschke, Aurélie Maurin

Project management: Alexander Gumz | Nadine Tenbieg

Supported by:

British Council, Institut Français, Literature Translation Institute of Korea, Nederlands Letterenfonds, NORLA Norwegian Literature Abroad, Romanian Cultural Institute, The Mandala Hotel. The poesiefestival berlin is a project of the Haus für Poesie in cooperation with the silent green Kulturquartier and the Akademie der Künste and is supported by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds.