Adam Wiedemann Adam Wiedemann (born 1967 in Krotoszyn, Poland) is a poet and writer, literary and music critic and translator of Slovenian poetry. He is one of the best-known of Polish poets of the younger generation. Wiedemann writes humorous everyday verse with very precisely worked language and full of false trails. The poems are complex, ironic compositions with unexpected turns. “The joy of reading Wiedemann’s poems is so great because you have the feeling that you’re being drawn in, not only as a sympath ... more
Lorenz Wilkens Lorenz Wilkens (born in Hanover in 1943), grew up in Rendsburg in Holstein. He is a religious scholar and held various positions in the church from 1979 to 2006, including as a trainer of teachers of religion and in church adult education, and was a parish vicar for five years, ordained in 1989. In 1993 he gained a PhD at the Berlin Free University with a thesis on ‘Figures of Dissemination in the Gospels’, a revised version of which was published in 2008 by Peter Lang Verlag. After retiring he ... more Lorenz Wilkens
Saul Williams Saul Williams (b. 1972 New York) is a hybrid. He is a rock star, rapper and poet. He was the Grand Slam Champion des Nuyorican Poets Cafe and played the lead role in the film “Slam”, which was a winner at the Sundance Festival and scooped the Golden Camera award in Cannes. He has worked, among others, with Erykah Badu, De La Soul, The Fugees, Rage Against the Machine and Nine Inch Nails. In addition to music CDs, he has also published four volumes of poetry. His works are characterised by uncomp ... more
Ron Winkler Ron Winkler (born in Jena in 1973) is a poet and translator and has edited many anthologies. He co-founded the magazine intendenzen and is an editor of the online magazines satt.org and Lyrik.log. In his poems he deconstructs apparently idyllic landscapes with the language of the natural sciences, allowing dry terms to enter into combinations with intimate sensuality. He was awarded the 2005 Leonce and Lena Prize and the 2006 Mondseer Poetry Prize, and, more recently, the 2015 Munich Poetry Priz ... more Ron Winkler (c) gezett
Georg Witte Georg Witte (b. 1952 in Arnsberg) is Professor for General and Comparative Literature and Slavic Literatures at the Freie Universität Berlin.He studied German and Slavic Studies in Munich, Cologne and Bochum. In 1984 and 1985 he was a research fellow at Moscow State University. He gained his doctorate in 1987 at the University of Bochum, where he was working as a research fellow. This was followed in 1992 by his ‘Habilitation’ qualification as a professor. He was then appointed in 1994 as Profes ... more Georg Witte © privat
Uljana Wolf Uljana Wolf (born in Berlin in 1979) won the Peter Huchel Prize for her first collection of poems in 2006. Researching between languages plays a major role in her poems, in which she outlines what cannot be translated with clear forms. Living today in New York and Berlin, she explores political issues of identity, migration and language policy in her texts on migration between languages and cultures. Her poems have been translated into more than fifteen languages. Her texts are instruments of un ... more Uljana Wolf (c) Kai Nedden / Robert Bosch Stiftung
Agnieszka Wolny-Hamkało Agnieszka Wolny-Hamkało was born in Wrocław, Poland, in 1979, and has published three anthologies of short stories and six books of poetry. She works as a television journalist and is a presenter for a cultural programme in which new book releases are presented. Wolny-Hamkało often turns into a performance artist when she is presenting her own work, using her whole body to give expression to her poems and enhancing her verses with a vibraphone. When she is not on the stage, she teaches Creative ... more
Zheng Xiaoqiong Zheng Xiaoqiong (b.1980 in the south-west Chinese province of Sichuan) unexpectedly won the major Liqun Literature Award in 2007. Until then she had been completely unknown in China’s literary life. Zheng Xiaoqiong began writing poems when she moved to Dongguan City in Guangdong Province in 2001 as a migrant worker and spent six years working in a hardware factory. Her experiences in those years became the material for her literature in her cycle The Book of the Women Workers. Her texts tell of ... more Zheng Xiaoqiong © privat
Neslihan Yalman Neslihan Yalman (born 1982, Ankara, Turkey) lives in Izmir, where she teaches literature and poetry. She publishes poems regularly on the website “Haber3” and in literary magazines. Yalman is one of the few women poets in Turkey who confronts feminine taboo topics and foregrounds the feminine and masculine characteristics of the Turkish language. At the centre of her poems are female sexuality and eroticism, nudity and uncovering, abortion and fertility; they bear elements of shamanism. Alongsi ... more Neslihan Yalman
Ken Yamamoto The variety of Ken Yamamoto’s (born 1977, Paris) biography makes it immediately clear: here is someone who has spread his roots far and wide, in much more than one country and one poetics. Yamamoto was born in 1977 in Paris as the son of a Japanese father and a German mother, and grew up speaking French. He worked as a dubbing actor, conveyor-belt worker, bike courier, diamond salesman, office worker, exhibition guide and assistant director. Yamamoto studied Art History and German Philology an ... more Ken Yamamoto Foto: Robert Gärtner
Yaneq Yaneq (*1973 as Jan Kage in Bonn) studied sociology and cultural studies in Berlin where he now works as a rapper, singer, actor, journalist and author. In 2006, he published a solo album entitled “Widersprüche”, a fusion of hip-hop and electronic music with punk attitude. In 2002, his “American Rap. HipHop und Identität” book appeared, the quintessence of his academic activities with hip-hop culture within the framework of his studies. As a prominent exponent of Berlin’s hip-hop scene, he is al ... more