Long Lines, Long Days
Berlin Poetry Lecture 2026 by Valzhyna Mort

Reading
Poesiefestival Berlin 2026
Kuppelhalle, silent green
← / →

Valzhyna Mort © Marco Giugliarelli for the Civitella Ranieri Foundation 2023

The eleventh Berlin Poetry Lecture will be delivered by the poet Valzhyna Mort (born 1981 in Minsk, Belarus). She has lived in the United States since 2005 and writes in Belarusian and English. For her most recent collection Music for the Dead and Resurrected (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020) she was awarded one of the most important poetry prizes, the International Griffin Poetry Prize.

Valzhyna Mort follows previous speakers Oswald Egger (2016), John Burnside (2017), Elke Erb (2018), Sergio Raimondi (2019), Anne Carson (2020), Johannes Jansen (2021), Michèle Métail (2022), Kim Hyesoon (2023), Terrance Hayes (2024), and Claudia Rankine (2025).

Three years ago, on June 8, 2023, during a residency in Umbria, Valzhyna Mort began writing what would become this lecture – “a prose poem,” as the subtitle describes it. As the occasion for the text, Mort cites a photograph of an elderly woman holding a child in her arms, fleeing the floods that followed the destruction of the Kakhovka dam by the Russian army. Yet the text’s condensed imagery reaches back to Mort’s childhood and far beyond: to her grandmother Yanya, who survived the Second World War as an orphan, and to her great-grandmother Yusefa, who died young shortly after her farmstead known as Alexandrovichy was forcibly evacuated. The green hill that now marks the site where Alexandrivichy was burned to the ground is visible from Padlyadze, where Mort spent her childhood summers. This horizon line of Padlyadze – then a “practice horizon, a reachable, child-friendly edge of the world” – became a point of departure, the first line of her poems, and remains to this day the measure of her writing: “Everything I wrote, I measured against that horizon line held by Yusefa’s round face.” In the text, Mort traces recurring patterns in the lives of Yanya and Yusefa – recognizing them in the photograph of the elderly woman with the child in her arms, seeing Yusefa’s log cabin in a painting by Chagall – and carries them forward in the hope of making the invisible visible and preserving her grandmother’s stories in writing.

The lecture will be held in English with German surtitles.

At the event, Long Lines, Long Days will celebrate its English and German (translated by Katharina Narbutovič) publication by Wallstein Verlag (18,00 €). Deutschlandfunk Kultur will broadcast a recording of the lecture.