HAUS FÜR POESIE

María José Ferrada (born 1977 in Temuco, Chile) is the author of two novels available in German translation to date, Kramp and The Billboard Keeper (Berenberg Verlag, 2021 and 2024), as well as two poetry collections for children. Last year saw the publication, in Silke Kleemann’s German translation, of a poetry collection that was selected for the German Poetry Recommendation List. Comprising twenty-four fragments accompanied by black-and-white photographs by illustrator Rodrigo Marín, the book evokes a mythic landscape. The cycle opens with the idea that every story begins in the forest and follows a collective voice that fashions a world in close connection with plants, animals, and a self-made deity. Observing branches and seeds, this community listens to the language of the forest and transforms it into song, whose ascent gradually seems to reach beyond the earthly realm.

Sergio Ojeda Barías (born 1965 in Puerto Natales, Chile) is a poet and university lecturer. He holds a doctorate in literary studies from the Universidad de Chile and has lived in Berlin for many years. He is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Berlín (Mago Editores, 2024), from which he will read this evening. The book traces a poetic map of a life lived between continents: childhood in Patagonia, the present in Berlin, and memories of Santiago. Streets, avenues, and cities overlap in the poems as though they belonged to a single geography, collapsing distance and connecting disparate places. Yet the coordinates that once provided orientation have been unsettled by the death of the speaker’s father. Personal loss reshapes both body and landscape, rendering former maps obsolete.

Carlos Soto Román (born 1977 in Valparaíso, Chile) is a poet and pharmacist, currently living in Berlin as a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. The history and legacy of the Chilean dictatorship are central concerns in his poetry collections, including Chile Project [Re-Classified] (2013) and 11 (2017). Drawing on archival documents and historical records, his work transforms documentary material into poetry. The same approach informs Antuco (Parasitenpresse, 2025), written in collaboration with Carlos Cardani Parra and available in German translation by Timo Berger. The book revisits the disaster that occurred on the slopes of the Antuco volcano in 2005, when more than forty military conscripts died of hypothermia during a training march in extreme weather conditions. Through documentary and poetic means, the text reconstructs the event and reflects on obedience, vulnerability, and the human cost of institutional decisions.

The event will be interpreted between Spanish and German. Kindly supported by ECHOO Conference Interpreting.

This event is part of the festival Barrio | Bairro Berlin 2026, supported by the Capital Cultural Fund (Hauptstadtkulturfonds), with the generous assistance of the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Embassy of Chile in Germany, and DIRAC.

In Reading & Conversation María José Ferrada, Sergio Ojeda Barías, Carlos Soto Román
Moderation Silke Kleemann