Haus für Poesie

Monika Rinck (born in Zweibrücken in 1969) is a poet, song lyric writer, essayist and translator and lives in Berlin. Her work uniquely combines laconic expression with opulence; it is philosophical and sensual, comic and serious at the same time. Rinck collaborates with other poets and with artists and musicians, including the composers Franz Tröger and Bo Wiget as well as poets Ann Cotten and Sabine Scho (as the Rotten Kinck Schow). Together with poet Orsolya Kalász she translates from Hungarian (e.g. the poets Márió Z. Nemes and István Kemény). Rinck has been awarded many prizes and honours for her work, most recently the Peter Huchel Prize for her collection Honigprotokolle, the Heimrad Bäcker Prize and the Kleist Prize. Monika Rinck is a member of P.E.N. Club, the poetry collective ‘Lyrikknappschaft Schöneberg’, the Academy of the Arts Berlin and the German Academy for Language and Poetry.
 
Publications (selection):
Risiko und Idiotie. Streitschriften. kookbooks, Berlin 2015
Hasenhass. Eine Fibel in 47 Bildern. Verlag Peter Engstler, Ostheim/Rhön 2013
Honigprotokolle. kookbooks, Berlin 2012
Helle Verwirrung/Rincks Ding- und Tierleben. Gedichte. Texte unter
Zeichnungen. kookbooks, Berlin 2009
zum fernbleiben der umarmung. Gedichte. kookbooks, Berlin 2007
Ah, das Love-Ding. Essays. kookbooks, Berlin 2006
Verzückte Distanzen. Gedichte. Zu Klampen, Springe 2004

In English:
to refrain from embracing, translated by Nicholas Grindell, Burning Deck, Providence R.I, 2007

Christian Filips (born in Osthofen in 1981) is a poet, director, singer and music dramaturge and lives in Berlin. He was awarded the Austrian Rimbaud Prize in 2001 for his first book of poems, Schluck auf Stein. From 2001 to 2003 he was dramaturge at the dance theatre of the Darmstadt Staatstheater, and since 2006 he has been the programme and archive director of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin. Since 2010 he has been editing the roughbooks series of contemporary poetry together with Urs Engeler. In 2012 he received the Heimrad Bäcker Promotion Prize.
The Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper has described the literary works of Christian Filips as comprising a “movement of mixed poetic language which includes sociolects and dialects and well as journalese and technical lingo“, but also an elevated and historically-conscious tone. Since 2009 his poetic works have been taking on increasingly performative forms and assuming at times the character of social sculptures. Most recently, Filips has been working more intensively as a director, singer and performer, including for the Berlin Volksbühne and the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. He is also a translator, especially of texts from English, Dutch and Italian.

Publications:
Der Scheiße-Engel. Verlag Peter Engstler 2015
Heiße Fusionen. Gesänge von der Krise. roughbooks, Berlin/Holderbank 2010
Schluck auf Stein. Gedichtband. Elfenbein Verlag, Heidelberg 2001

Audio:
Lieder für die letzte Runde.kookbooks 2015 (as singer and speaker)

Orsolya Kalász (born in Dunaújváros, Hungary in 1964) lives in Budapest and Berlin. She has been working as a writer and translator since 1984. Her father, the Hungarian writer and poet Márton Kalász, worked in the House Of Hungarian Culture in East Berlin in the early 1970s, where she went to German primary school until 1974. After leaving school in Hungary she studied German and Hungarian Literature and Linguistics at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Orsolya Kalász is equally at home in the Hungarian and German languages. In her poems she plays with the idiomatic interferences between the two languages, exploring possibilities for such a dialogue. Monika Rinck has written of her that her poems testify to “foreignness and the ability to live with this foreignness.“ In particular in her translations she does great service to the exchange between Hungarian and German literature. Together with Gerhard Falkner she edited the acclaimed anthology Budapester Szenen. Her next collection is forthcoming from Brüterich Press in July 2016.

Publications (Auswahl):
Sandfuge. Gedichte. Merz & Solitude, Stuttgart 2009
Naive Pflanze. Merz & Solitude, Stuttgart 2008
alles, was wird, will seinen strauch. With an essay by Monika Rinck. gutleut verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007
Budapester Szenen. Junge ungarische Lyrik. (ed.) DuMont Verlag, Cologne 1999
Babymonster und die Gärtner. Poetische Bögen: Heft XII. Connewitzer Verlagsbuchhandlung, Leipzig 1997

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 has continued publishing books on theological topics and numerous essays.

Publications:
“Deine Treue hat dich geheilt“. Studien über die Heilungsmacht Jesu und die apokalyptische Erwartung im Markusevangelium. Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011
Figuren der Vermittlung in den Evangelien. Eine religions-philosophische Studie. Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2008
Zur Kritik der Vernunftreligion. Religionswissenschaftliche Vorträge und Aufsätze. Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2008
Hermeneutik nach dem Existentialismus. Theologische Vorträge und Aufsätze. Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007