HAUS FÜR POESIE

Rudi Burkhardt (born 1992 in Laupheim) is one of the most subversive and at the same time one of the wittiest poets of contemporary German literature. He has published two books: Wer A sagt (Gutleut Verlag 2018) and Fragmente einer echten Ikone (kookbooks 2024). For the long poem Common Gothic, from which he will read excerpts this evening, he was awarded the Leonce-und-Lena-Preis in 2025. The poem tells of “the great seizure” that liberates the titular Gothic from “the grinding tracery,” so that even the “prick-arches” prick up their ears.

Lorna Goodison (born 1947 in Kingston, Jamaica) is one of the most internationally acclaimed poets writing in English. Her name is often mentioned alongside Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. She served as Poet Laureate of Jamaica from 2017 to 2020 and has published a total of 16 poetry collections; her most recent is her Caribbean reinterpretation of The Divine Comedy: Dante’s Inferno (Carcanet Press 2025). Her poetry, richly imagistic and colloquial in tone – she frequently uses Jamaican Creole (Patwa) alongside Standard English – offers an intense engagement with Jamaican history and culture.

Stanisław Kalina Jaglarz (born 1991 in Katowice) has, with just two award-winning poetry collections, become one of the most important voices in European queer literature: gościć sójki (2022, “hosting jays”) and zajęczy żar (2024, “hare’s glow”). In his work, he adopts a distinctly non-anthropocentric perspective in which the boundary between human and nature is systematically destabilized. These are poems about bitterness left behind – like a lip split open after a fight.

Milena Marković (born 1974 in Belgrade, Serbia) is not only a poet but also one of Serbia’s best-known playwrights. In her autobiographically inflected verse novel deca (LOM 2021, “children”), awarded the NIN Prize for Novel of the Year, she offers an unflinchingly candid account of her youth in a country marked by violence and upheaval, of childhood trauma, of life with her cognitively impaired son, and of the uncompromising desire to taste everything life has to offer, even if it should be brief.

Valzhyna Mort (born 1981 in Minsk, Belarus) has lived in the United States since 2005 and writes in both Belarusian and English. For her most recent poetry collection Music for the Dead and Resurrected (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2020), she was awarded the International Griffin Poetry Prize. Her poems powerfully sing of the dead and the oppressed, preserving their collective memory. Again and again, they return to Belarus, to Minsk, where rooftops fold over houses like the hands of the dead and streets bear the names of murderers.

Laura Vazquez (born 1986 in Perpignan, France) is one of the most important voices in contemporary French poetry. Her collection Le livre du large et du long (Éditions du sous-sol 2023) was awarded the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie. In this turbulent, expansive verse epic in five parts, the true protagonist is language itself, which comes into being during the journey and explores the world as well as existence within its own limits: “I will tell you what I have seen and intuited of the world and the signs that surround us.”

Mia You (born 1980 in Seoul, South Korea) grew up in California and now lives in Utrecht. In the poems of her most recent collection Festival (Belladonna*, 2025) – which was simultaneously published in Dutch – K-pop, Wittgenstein, Freud, and sparkling heart emojis merge into a trompe-l’œil vision of a globalized cultural festival, in which dysfunctional routines and structures of discrimination are endlessly repeated: “The greatest relationship I’ve ever had is with Empire. / Even before my mother, there was Empire; long after she’s gone, Empire.”

Most of the poems presented at the event were translated specifically for Poesiefestival Berlin.

The poets will be introduced by Julia Cimafiejeva, Odile Kennel, Awuor Ouma, Tomasz Różycki, Lea Schneider, Alexander Schnickmann, Verica Tričković

Readings in the original language with German and English translations.

Funded by: Institut français Berlin, Polnisches Kulturinstitut, Traduki