HAUS FÜR POESIE

As part of the Barrio | Bairro Festival, which brings contemporary literature from Latin America and the Latin American diaspora to Berlin, three poets will read at the Haus für Poesie:

Laura Erber (born 1979 in Rio de Janeiro) lives in the Netherlands, writes prose and poetry, and is a visual artist. Her first German collection will soon be published in translation by Timo Berger under the title Zollbureau für Zucker und Tabak (Siesta Verlag). Its fragmentary poems are a poetic search for traces—memories, smells, materials—and for the recurring structures of colonial orders in bodies, places, and goods: „am ende des tages kann alles explodieren und wieder von vorne anfangen durch das was nicht aufhört“.

Leonardo Tonus (born in São Paulo) is a professor of Brazilian literature at Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. His third collection was published in German in 2023, translated by Lilli-Hannah Hoepner, under the title Aufzeichnungen von hoher See (Hagebutte Verlag). It intertwines contemporary and historical movements of flight with Tonus’s own family history of Italian emigration to Brazil, creating a collective narrative of migration that resists forgetting: „wie wissen, wer wir sind / wenn wir die Not des anderen / – der wir auch sind – / vergessen?“

Enrique Winter (born 1982 in Santiago de Chile) lives in Cologne and was awarded the Anna Seghers Prize this year for his writing. A German selection of his work, translated by Léonce W. Lupette, Sarah Otter, and Johanna Schwering, was published in 2018 under the title Oben das Meer unten der Himmel (parasitenpresse). Winter’s poems search for a language to express a socially fractured present, where the political traumas of the past linger, the jump rope becomes the rope on which the grandfather hangs himself: „weil wir meinten, das Vergessen fange keinen Staub“.

The event will be interpreted in Spanish, Portuguese, and German. It is part of Barrio | Bairro Berlin 2025, with kind support from the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Chilean Embassy in Germany, and DIRAC.

Reading & Conversation Laura Erber, Leonardo Tonus, Enrique Winter
Moderation Douglas Pompeu