Artists 2016: VERSschmuggel / reVERSible: Languages of South Asia – German

Rajendra Bhandari

Rajendra Bhandari (born in Darjeeling, Nepal in 1956) has lived in Gangtok for more than 30 years and is one of the most important contemporary Nepalese poets. He is an associate professor of the Language and Literature of Nepal at Sikkim University in Gangtok, and has a doctorate in Nepalese Literature from the University of North Bengal. He has won many prizes for his collections of poetry. His verse is heavily influenced by his social environment and is noteworthy for its extraordinary rhythms, succinct style and colloquial mode of expression.

Publications:
Pwaankhharurah Aakash. Nikhil Prakshan 2010
Kshar/Akshar. Jana Paksha Prakashan 1998
Yee shabdaharu: yeeharafharu. Jana Paksha Prakashan 1986
Hiundeyyeechisaraatkapardeharuma.Padmakala Prakashan 1979

Awards (selection):
Dr.Shova Kanti Thegim Memorial Award for poetry, Gangtok 1999
Shiva Kumar Rai Memorial Award of the South Sikkim Sahitya Sammelan 1998
Diyalo Purashkar in Poetry of the Nepali Sahitya Sammelan, Darjeeling1981

Daniela Danz

Daniela Danz (c) Madiha Aijaz

Daniela Danz (born in Eisenach in 1976) studied Art History and German in Tübingen, Prague, Berlin, Leipzig and Halle an der Saale and wrote her doctoral thesis on hospital church building in the Weimar Republic. She has taught in Osnabruck and currently teaches at the University of Hildesheim. From 2003 to 2010 she was an art inventorist for the Evangelical Church. Danz is now a freelance writer and lives in Kranichfeld . Since 2013 she has been the director of the Schiller House in Rudolstadt.
Her writing covers poetry, prose, essays and children’s literature. She also collaborates with composers. Some of her works have been set to music and translated into other languages. Danz’s literature confronts the canon of classical forms and ancient materials such as the epics of Homer and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, taking them as a starting point for seeking out transitions to recent history such as the Second World War and social and political themes such as migration.

Publications (selection):
Lange Fluchten. Novel. Wallstein Verlag 2016
V. Gedichte. Wallstein Verlag 2014
Pontus. Poems. Wallstein Verlag 2010
Türmer. Novel. Wallstein Verlag 2006

Hendrik Jackson

Hendrick Jackson (c) gezett

Hendrik Jackson was born in 1971 in Düsseldorf and is a poet, essayist and translator, mainly from Russian, and an editor of the web portal lyrikkritik.de. He grew up in Münster and studied Film Science, Slavic Studies and Philosophy in Berlin, where he now lives. Together with other poets he organises the literary series Parlandopark, in which such writers as Marte Huke, Monika Rinck, Christian Filips and Steffen Popp perform. Hendrik Jackson has translated Marina Tsvetaeva‘s Poem of the End. New Year‘s Letter into German (edition per procura 2003). In 2005 he received the Wolfgang Weyrauch Promotion Prize, in 2006 the Hans Erich Nossack Promotion Prize and in 2008 the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize of the City of Bad Homburg vor der Höhe. His most recent collection of poems is Im Licht der Prophezeiungen (In the Light of the Prophecies), in which, as already in brausende bulgen, contemporary and Late-Mediaeval linguistic worlds blend into a higher unity.

Publications (selection):
Im Licht der Prophezeiungen. kookbooks 2012
Dunkelströme. kookbooks 2006
brausende bulgen. 95 Thesen über die Flußwasser in der menschlichen Seele. editionper procura 2004
einflüsterungen von seitlich. MorpheoVerlag 2001

Orsolya Kalász

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

Mamta Sagar

Mamta Sagar (c) Roy Sinai

Mamta Sagar (born in Bangalore, India in 1966) is an academic, a poet, a translator and a screenwriter. She writes in Kannada, a language spoken mainly in southern India. Her poems have been translated and published in most Indian languages and many foreign languages. Her most recent book, Hide & Seek was published as a bilingual collection of verse with English translations. Mamta Sagar studied Journalism and Literature and took her PhD with a thesis on Gender, Patriarchy and Resistance: Contemporary Women’s Poetry in Kannada and Hindi (1980–2000). She has taught among other subjects Kannada, Indian Literature, Women’s Writing in India and Gender Studies. She is also an activist for women’s rights and against child labour. She has also been an art and theatre critic for some if India’s main daily newspapers. In 2015 Mamta Sagar was awarded the British Charles Wallace Fellowship.

Publications (selection):
Hide & Seek. Selected Poems. Peakpublish 2014
Illi Salluva Maatu (Words that matter). IBH Prakashana 2010
Rajakumaari Kathe. 2001
Chukki Chukki Chandakki. C.V.G. Publications 1999
Nadiya Neerina Teva. Ila Prakashana 1999
Kaada Navilina Hejje. Akshara Prakashana 1992

Sajjad Sharif

Sajjad Sharif (c) Munem Wasif

Sajjad Sharif (born in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1963) grew up in the colourful, labyrinthine alleyways of the Old City of Dhaka and has been writing poems since the early 1980s. In common with other writers he is working to radicalise contemporary Bangla poetry and was crucially involved in the pioneering work of the literary magazine Gandiva. In his poetry collection Chhurichikitsa (Knife Therapy) he broke with the conventions of Bengali poetry.
Sajjad Sharif has translated selected poems of Federico García Lorca and writes essays on literary and cultural criticism topics. He is co-editor of an anthology of contemporary poetry from Bangladesh entitled Bangladesher Nirbachito Kobita (Selected poems of Bangladesh), which was published in India. He has worked as a journalist for 26 years and is currently a senior editor with Prothom Alo, the most-read daily newspaper in Bangladesh.

Publications:
Chhurichikitsa (KnifeTherapy). Prothoma Prokashon 2014
Rokto o Oshrur Gatha (Ballad of Blood and Tears).Prothoma Prokashon 2012
Jekhane Liberty Mane Statue (Where Liberty is Statue). Sandesh 2009

Amar Sindhu

Amar Sindhu is a Pakistani writer who is a member of the Sindhi ethnic group. She is famous for her unsparing human rights activism, her unlimited support for disadvantaged people and her ability to express her opinion clearly and unambiguously in every life situation. She is Professor of Philosophy at the Sindh University in Jamshoro and an active member of the Women’s Action Forum. Together with friends she edits the magazine Adrish, which deals with political, social, cultural and theoretical topics. Her social commitment and self-identification as a feminist in Sindh province are also reflected in her poems.

Publication:
Ojagiyan Ankhein ja Sapna. Auratzad 2013

Judith Zander

Judith Zander (c) Yawan Rai

Judith Zander (born 1980 in Anklam) lives in Berlin. In Greifswald she studied German, English and mediaeval and modern history, completing her studies with a diploma from the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. As well as writing poetry, she translates American poetry, including by such poets as Sylvia Plath and Bog Hicok.
“Her palimpsests combine hard-hitting satire and subtle irony. Traditions have seldom has the dust knocked off them in a more relaxed, light and fresh way” (Die Welt).
Judith Zander won the Poetry Prize at the 15th open mike in 2007. She also won the 2009 Wolfgang Weyrauch Promotional Prize in the ‘Literary March’. Last year she was awarded the 3sat Prize in the Ingeborg Bachmann competition.
Most recent books
Dinge, die wir heute sagten, dtv, 2010
Oder tau, dtv, 2011