Haus für Poesie

Henning Ahrens (born 1964 in Peine, Germany) is a writer and literary translator. He studied English, History and Art History in Göttingen, London and Kiel. In 1995 he gained his doctorate at the University of Kiel. In his poems he looks for the “right words”, finding which should enable him to describe situations and feelings as he actually sees and experiences them, regardless of social or artistic patterns or models.
Prizes/distinctions:
Wolfgang Weyrauch Promotion Prize (1999), Promotion Prize in the Nicolas Born Prize of the State of Lower Saxony (2000), Friedrich Hebbel Prize (2001), Nicolas Born Prize (2009) 
Publications:
John Cowper Powys' Elementalismus. Eine Lebensphilosophie. (doctoral thesis. Frankfurt am Main 1997)Lieblied was kommt. Poem (998)Stoppelbrand Poems (2000)Lauf Jäger lauf! Novel (2002)Langsamer Walzer. Novel (2004)Tiertage. Novel (2007)Kein Schlaf in Sicht. Poems (2008) 

Tadeusz Dąbrowski (born 1979 in Elblag, Poland) is a poet, essayist, critic and editor of the literary journal “Topos”. He lives and works in Gdansk. His poems have been translated into several languages including German, English, Swedish, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Slovenian. He is the editor of “ Poza słowa. Antologia wierszy 1976–2006”, an anthology of contemporary Polish poetry. In his works he combines reality with fictitious, often ironically told anecdotes. He creates a balance between the sublime and abstract on the one hand and the everyday on the other. “For Dąbrowski our world is made up of countless inducements to take a look on “the other side”. Under the shoe sole, under the skin, behind the curtain and beneath the hair. There he finds truly astounding things. Moreover, he knows how to play with poetry.” Tadeusz Nyczek)
Prizes/distinctions/grants and fellowships:
Winner of the Hubert Burda Prize (2008), “The Little Sceptre” Prize of the Polish Cultural Foundation (2006), grant from the Polish Culture Ministry (2007), Literarisches Colloquium Berlin artist-in-residence fellowship (2006)
Publications:
Wypieki (1999)
e-mail (2000)
mazurek (2002)
Te Deum (2005, 2008)
Czarny Kwadrat" (2009)
Numerous publications in national and international literary press. In October his “Selected Poems” is appearing in Germany (Luxbooks) and in 2010 in the USA (Zephyr Press).

Marzanna Bogumila Kielar (born 1963 in Goldap, Poland) debuted in 1992 with the poetry collection “Sacra Conversazione”, for which she won two major literary prizes the same year. She writes subtle, personal verse into which she constantly threads references to culture and philosophy. Her images are practically tangible in their strength and sharpness. “The poems of Marzanna Boqumila Kielar reconstruct a mythical, motionless space.” (Andrzej Stasiuk).
Publications:
Sacra Conversazione (1992)
Materia Prima (1999)
Monodia (2006)
Salt Monody (dual-language selection), translated from Polish by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese, (2006)

Roman Honet (born 1974 in Krakow, Poland) is a polish poet and literary critic. He teaches Creative Writing in the literary-artistic studio at the Jagellonian University in Krakow. From 1995-2008 he edited the literary journal “Studium” and the books published by this journal. His poems have been translated into several languages including English, German, Russian and Italian. Honet’s verse is full of contrasts, with a moving combination of sensitivity, sensibility and cruelty. It is dominated by existential unease, which the poetic “I” tries to overcome with images from the past and language full of irony.
Publications:
Alicja (1996)
Pójdziesz synu do piekła (1998)
Serce (2002)
baw się  (2008)
Moja (2008)
Editor of “Antologia nowej poezji polskiej 1990-2000” (2001)

Brigitte Oleschinski (born 1955 in Cologne, Germany) lives as a writer in Berlin. She completed a degree in Political Science at the Free University Berlin and has worked as a contemporary historian on questions of political repression in totalitarian systems. Since the mid-1980s she has published poetry collections and essays on the poetics of poems, had residencies in Germany and abroad and has appeared at international festivals and conferences, had guest professorships, and been involved in poetry performances and Internet projects (including www.neuedichte.de). From 2003 to 2005 she organised the poetry performance “Laut Lesung” (Reading Aloud) with Indonesian artists, which was performed in various cities in Germany, Indonesia and Mexico.
Awards:
Erich Fried Prize (2004), Ernst Meister Prize (2001), Peter Huchel Prize (1998)
Publications (selection):
Geisterströmung. Poems, with CD “Wie Gedichte singen” (How Poems Sing) (2004)
Argo Cargo. Essay with audio CD (2003)
Reizstrom in Aspik. Wie Gedichte denken (2002)
Your Passport is Not Guilty. Poems (1997)
Die Schweizer Korrektur (The Swiss Correction), together with Durs Grünbein and Peter Waterhouse (1995) (also as CD “Mehr ein Hören als ein Gebäude” (More a hearing than a building)
Mental Heat Control. Poems (1990) 

Marta Podgórnik (born 1979 in Gliwice, Poland) is a poet, writer, literary critic and editor. She teaches creative writing workshops in Wrocław and Kolobrzeg. Her poems have already been published in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Russia, Sweden, Great Britain, the USA, Italy and the Ukraine.
Podgórnik’s shows formal discipline. Her words unfold unusually dramatic power with their liveliness and the inventiveness of her language; new poetic situations are discovered or even created. Her works are full of energy and ambivalence.
Prizes/distinctions/grants and fellowships:
Prizewinner in the Jacka Bierezin Competition (1996), grant from the Polish Culture Ministry, nominated for the “Paszport Polityki” Prize (2001)
Publications:
Próby negocjacji (1996)
Długi maj (2004)
Dwa do jeden (2006)
Pięć opakowań (2008)

Jacek Podsiadło (born 1964 in Szewna, Poland) is a poet, essayist, translator and journalist. In his work he sets himself in opposition to social forms, structures and limits (e.g. state and military). Pacifist, almost anarchist tendencies can be seen, but his interest in everyday subjects is nonetheless clear. In his poetry, Podsiadło experiments with forms and linguistic styles. Between 1991 and 1998 he was the editor of the “bruLion” Press; from 2000 to 2007 he worked for the weekly literary journal “Tygodnik Powszechny”.
Prizes/distinctions:
Georg Tralek Prize (1994), Kościelski Prize (1998), Czesław Miłosz Prize (2000), nominated three times for the Nike Literature Prize (1999, 2000, 2006)Publications:
Nieszczęście doskonałe (1987)
Arytmia, bruLion (1993)
The all the Whales I’d love before (1996) 
Wiersze zebrane (1998)
I ja pobiegłem w tę mgłę (2000)

Steffen Popp (born 1978 in Greifswald, Germany) grew up in Dresden and now lives in Berlin. He attended the German Literature Institute in Leipzig before studying Literature and Philosophy in Berlin.
Since the publication of his debut collection “Wie Alpen”, Steffen Popp has been counted as one of the most important and distinctive emerging voices in German poetry. His poems have been described as “charmed, dripping with beauty and quirky”; they are constantly in movement in their tone and shifting motifs, complex in thought and rich in intense images. Poems by Steffen Popp have been translated into many languages, and have been appearing regularly in the FAZ national newspaper regularly for some years. His second collection, “Kolonie Zur Sonne” was published in 2008.
Prizes/distinctions:
Kranichstein Literature Promotion Prize of the German Literature Fund (2004)Akademie Graz prizewinner (2003), working grant from the Federal Academy for Cultural Education (2008), Rauris Literature Prize for the best first German-language novel of the year (2007), 2006 nomination for the German Book Prize.
Publications:
Kolonie Zur Sonne. Poems (2008)
Ohrenberg oder der Weg dorthin. Novel (2006)
Wie Alpen. Poems (2004)
Christian Hawkey: Reisen in Ziegengeschwindigkeit. Poems, translated from the American English with Uljana Wolf (2008)

Ilma Rakusa (born 1946 in Rimavská Sobota, Slovakia) spent her early childhood in Budapest, Ljubljana and Trieste; she studied Slavic Studies and Romance Studies in Zurich, Paris and Leningrad and has worked as a translator from French, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Hungarian and journalist (Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Die Zeit). Ilma Rakusa is now a freelance writer living in Zurich. She is a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry and of the board of the Allianz Cultural Foundation and many juries. In 2010-11 she was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
 
Publications:
Mehr Meer, Erinnerungspassagen, Graz 2009
Zur Sprache gehen, Dresden 2006
Langsamer! Gegen Atemlosigkeit, Akzeleration und andere Zumutungen. Graz, 2005
Translations (selection)
Marguerite Duras, Der Liebhaber, Frankfurt/M 1985
Marina Zwetajewa, Ein Abend nicht von dieser Welt, Prosa, Frankfurt/M 1999
Danilo Kiš: Sanduhr. novel. Munich 1988
Imre Kertész: Ich - ein anderer. Berlin 1998
Péter Nádas: Ohne Pause, Reinbek 1999

Piotr Sommer born 1948 in Wałbrzych, Poland) is a poet and translator of British and American poetry and Editor-in-Chief of the literary journal “Literatura na świecie” (Literature in the World). 
His works deal with the nitty-gritty of life, but without sententiousness. The apparent simplicity of his lines often reveals great depths. His work is dedicated without pathos to everyday life and in its form is almost like a conversation, a language game, frequently developing completely new literary forms full of irony. He views the world with a certain stubbornnes and warmth. Sommer writes poems about the fate of his generation. He is also the author of various political poems.
Prizes:
Kościelski Prize (1988), fellow of the DAAD Berlin Artists-in-Residence Programme (2008)
Publications:
W krześle (1977)
Pamiątki po nas (1980)
Kolejny świat (1983)
Czynnik liryczny i inne wiersze (1988)
Things to Translate & Other Poems (1991)
Piosenka pasterska (1999)

Ulf Stolterfoht (born in Stuttgart in 1963) became known for his fachsprachen (‘lingos’) series of books of poems, published by Urs Engeler). He has also translated Getrude Stein, conversed with Peter Dittmer‘s AMME (‘Nursie’) about poetry matters (Ammengespräche,  roughbooks 2011) and founded the virtual empire BRUETERICH, the poetry service for experimental poetry.
Through its imitative strategies, his poetry draws attention to the disconnect between world and language. His poems reveal a fascination with poetic method, language itself being in particular analysed as a means of creation. What is the carrying range of language, how clearly can it communicate, and at what point does it start to deceive?
From 2008 to 2009 he was a guest professor at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. Prizes he has been awarded include the 2005 Anna Seghers Prize and the 2008 Peter Huchel Prize. In 2009 he and Barbara Köhler shared the Erlangen Literature Prize for Poetry in Translation.
Publications (selection):
Fachsprachen I-IX.  poems, Urs Engeler 1998.
holzrauch über heslach. poems, Urs Engeler 2007.
Ammengespräche. poems, roughbooks 2010.
handapparat heslach: Quellen und Materialien, roughbooks 2011
Aufkommender Atem, Suhrkamp-Verlag 2011

The poet Anja Utler (born 1973 in Schwandorf, Germany) studied Slavic Studies, English Studies and Language Education, culminating in a doctorate from the University of Regensburg in 2003. She began writing prose in her youth, only later turning to poetry. She now lives in Vienna.
Her poetry is very precise in its rhythm and sound – individual poems are often described as “miracles of sound”. A frequent topic of her work is the not always symbiotic connection between nature and the human body. Subject and language form a unified whole and are difficult for the reader to disentangle.
Anja Utler has been awarded the Karl Sczuka Promotion Prize and the Leonce and Lena Prize. In their laudatio, the Jury said if her: “Anja Utler writes poems in cycles which live from an individual but thoroughly precise voicing at the edges of syntax. Her poems are sensuous sound installations on paper as well as when read aloud, without being just sound poetry.”
Prizes/distinctions:
Leonce and Lena Prize (2003), Promotion Prize in the Horst Bienek Prize for Poetry (2005), Promotion Prize of the German Schiller Foundation (2006), Promotion Prize in the Karl Sczuka Prize for Radio Play as Radio Art (2008)Publications:
Aufsagen (1999)
münden – entzüngeln (2004)
brinnen (2006)

Peter Waterhouse (*1956, Germany) studied German and English language and literature and received his doctorate in 1984 with a dissertation on Paul Celan. He is an a writer and translator and lives in Vienna. On awarding Peter Waterhouse the Erich Fried Prize in 2007, the jury member Ilma Rakusa said: “Peter Waterhouse is one of the most idiosyncratic voices in modern German-language literature. Since the early 1980s, in his poetry, prose, theatre plays and poetological essays, he has been dealing with the question of how language and the world relate to one another. His careful approach to objects, landscapes and people gets to the bottom of this paradoxical relationship over and again and creates epiphanies in the most emphatic sense." Peter Waterhouse’s latest work, published in 2006, was the novel "Krieg und Welt".

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 sympathetic reader but also into the creation of the meaning of his poetry.” (Andrzej Skrendo)
Prizes/distinctions/grants and fellowships:
Prize of the Polish Book Publishers’ Society (1998), Prize of the Koscielski Foundation (1999), “Gdynia” Literature Prize for the collection “Pensum” (2008), nominated for the NIKE Literature Prize (1998, 1999, 2005)
Publications:
Rozrusznik (1998)
Konwalia (2001)
Kalipso (2004)
Pensum (2007)
Filtry (2008)

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 understanding, with their precision of sound, experimental forms and stylistic concretion of the sensual. Not only her own poems but also her translations, mainly from American and Polish, have brought her to the fore . In 2009 she co-edited the renowned annual anthology Jahrbuch der Lyrik.

Publications:
meine schönste lengevitch. kookbooks 2013
Box Office. Münchner Reden zur Poesie 8. Stiftung LyrikKabinett 2009
falsche freunde. kookbooks 2009
kochanie ich habe brot gekauft. kookbooks 2005

In English:
false friends, translated by Susan Bernofsky, ugly duckling presse, New York, 2011

Awards (selection):
Adelbert von Chamisso Prize 2016
Erlanger Literature Prize for Poetry as Translation 2015
Wolfgang Weyrauch Promotion Prize 2013
Dresden Poetry Prize (jointly with Viola Fischerová) 2006
Peter Huchel Prize 2006