Haus für Poesie

Milan Děžinský (b. 1974 in Kyjov) is one of the outstanding Czech poets of his generation and has the potential to become a classic. He trained as a teacher of Czech and English in Ústí nad Labem, where he also began his literary activities by founding a student magazine in the early 1990s. Since then he has published numerous volumes of verse. In his poems he explores the “secret life” of the everyday. The poetic “I” in Děžinský’s poems sees through everyday imagery into the entropic cosmos of contrary references and a non-linear time that is banished into matter. Milan Děžinský translates such writers as Emily Dickinson, Phil Norton, Bruce Dawe and W.C. Williams from the English. His poetics are influenced by the reading of Anglophone poetry. Děžinský has been nominated for the Magnesia Litera literary prize for poetry several times and in 2014 for the Dresden Poetry Prize. In 2016 he was the inaugural winner of the International Václav Burian Poetry Prize. His poems, criticism and translations have appeared in magazines and anthologies. Poetic networking is important to him, leading him among other things to initiate the annual anthology of ‘The Best Czech Poems’. He works as an English teacher and lives in Roudnice nad Labem, where he has also been a city councillor since 2010.

Publications:
Černá hodinka, Velarium 1996
Kašel mé milenky, Host 1997
Slovník noci, Host 2003
Přízraky, Host 2007
Tajný život, Host 2012
Obcházení ostrova, Host 2017

Steffen Popp (b.1978 in Greifswald) spent his childhood in Dresden and went to a special school for science there. Steffen Popp studied at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig and later Literature and philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin. His first collection was published by kookbooks in 2004 followed by a novel in 2006. Since then he has published poetry collections as well as translations of English-language poets including Christian Hawkey and Ben Lerner. In 2011 He co-wrote and co-edited the collaborative poetics Helm aus Phlox. Zur Theorie des schlechtesten Werkzeugs together with Ann Cotten, Daniel Falb, Hendrik Jackson and Monika Rinck. In his collection 118 (2017) Steffen Popp takes the Periodic Table of Elements, the formulaic material basis of things, transforms it with language and forms it into poems. For this collection he was nominated for the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair in 2017.

Publications:
Wie Alpen, kookbooks 2004
Ohrenberg oder der Weg dorthin, kookbooks 2006
Kolonie Zur Sonne, kookbooks 2008
Dickicht mit Reden und Augen, kookbooks 2013
Panzere diesen Äquator, Mond. Zur Poesie César Vallejos, Wunderhorn 2016
118, kookbooks 2017

Awards:
Nomination for the German Book Prize 2006
Rauriser Literature Prize 2007
Leonce and Lena Prize 2011
Residency of the Rome German Academy in Olevano Romano 2012
Peter Huchel Prize 2014
Fellowship of the Rome German Academy Villa Massimo 2015
Mondseer Poetry Prize 2015
Nomination for the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair 2017

Pavel Novotný (b. 1976 in Liberec) is the head of the German Department of the Pedagogical Faculty in Liberec. His doctoral thesis deals with literary montage and collage and the possibilities of auditive and radiophonic poetry. He works experimentally in this area himself and has produces several radio compositions for Czech radio (ČRo3). Novotný is also a musician, setting his own dadaistic texts to music. Together with Jaromír Typlt he prepared a stage adaptation of Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate which was also adapted for radio. His composition Vesmír (Outer Space) was awarded the Prix Bohemia Radio in 2010. He translates writers such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Gerhard Rühm, Konrad Bayer, Thomas Bernhard and Anja Utler into Czech. He has published several collections of poems and poem cycles.
Since 2007 Novotný has been working on a multi-layered project called Tramvestie, looking at a tram journey between Liberec and Jablonec from multiple perspectives and with montages of speech from the tram. Novotný assembles the sound tracks recorded over these years into a composition lasting 26 minutes, which is the length of the real-time tram journey between these two places. The project was published as a book in 2016.

Publications:
Sběr, Krajská vědecká knihovna 2003
Mraky, Psí víno 2010
Die Vorformen der literarischen Montage, Arco Verlag 2012
Havarijní řád, Protimluv 2013
Tramvestie, Protimluv 2016
Zevnitř, Pavel Mervart 2017

Awards:
Prix Bohemia Radio 2010

Nadja Küchenmeister (b. 1981) lives and works in Berlin as a freelance writer. She has a degree in German Literature and Sociology from Berlin Technical University and studied at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig, where she has also taught. Nadja Küchenmeister is a reviewer and writer of plays and features for radio. Her poems and prose texts have been published in many magazines and anthologies. Her collection of poems Alle Lichter was praised and celebrated in the German press with comments such as “She reminds one of the young Rilke” (Harald Hartung) or “No-one has addressed a You, themselves or the reader so intensely and searchingly since Ingeborg Bachmann” (Dorothea von Törne).
She has been awarded many distinctions for her poetry collections including the Hermann Lenz Fellowship and the Mondseer Poetry Prize. In 2015 a book appeared from Coiscéim Press with selected poems in English (translated by Hans-Christian Oeser) and Gaelic (translated by Gabriel Rosenstock) with the title Under the Juniper Tree / Faoin Aiteal.

Publications:
Nachbild, SchwarzHandPresse2009
Alle Lichter, Schöffling & Co. 2010
Unter dem Wacholder, Schöffling & Co. 2014

Awards:
Mondseer Poetry Prize 2010
Art Prize Literature of Land Brandenburg Lotto GmbH 2010
Literature Prize of the Eisenhüttenstadt Steel Foundation 2012
Ulla Hahn Authors Prize 2012
Horst Bingel Prize for Literature 2014
Promotion Prize of the Bremen Literature Prize 2015

Pavel Kolmačka (b. 1962 in Prague) has lived since 1990 in Chrudichromy in the Moravian countryside where he grows vegetable and keeps bees and sheep. In his work, the simplest things can have a high spiritual value bringing mysticism into everyday life. Kolmačka is a trained electrical engineer and has worked as a hospital orderly, an editor, translator, teacher and bar keeper. He began publishing his work in the underground in the 1980s, with his first official publications such as Vlál za mnou směšný šos (A Ridiculous Tailcoat is Fluttering Along Behind Me, 1994) following in the 1990s. To begin with, Kolmačka’s rhymed verse followed in the poetic footprints of the great catholic poet Bohuslav Reynek. He is now increasingly moving closer to the border with prose. Kolmačka’s poems hava great expressive force and make him one of the most well-regarded Czech poets of his generation. He also published a novel in 2006.

Publications:
Básně. Poems, 1988 (self-published) ‑ with Bohdan Chlíbec, Miroslav Salava and Evald MurrerViděl jsi že jsi, Petrov 1998
Stopy za obzor, Triáda 2006
Moře, Triáda 2010
Jedna věta, Revolver Revue 2011
Wittgenstein bije žáka, Triáda 2014

Léonce W. Lupette (b. 1986 in Göttingen) lives between Argentina and Germany as a writer, translator from Spanish, Portuguese and English and a critic. He studied Comparative Literature, Latin American Studies and Philosophy in Frankfurt am Main and Buenos Aires. Lupette is co-editor of the digital art and literature magazine karawa.net, and from 2012 to 2014 he also co-edited the magazine Alba. Lateinamerika lesen. He edits a Latin American series for his press luxbooks. Poets he has translated in German include John Ashbery, Esteban Echeverría and Jorge Kanese. For his translation (together with Tobias Amslinger, Norbert Lange and Mathias Traxler) of Charles Bernstein’s poems he was awarded the Prize of the City of Münster for International Poetry in 2015.
In his poems Lupette dissects the things of everyday life and puts them back together in amusing and playful ways. Repetitions, interruptions and fragmentary speech are inscribed into the poems and achieve their full effect in performance. Léonce Lupette is Governor of the Overseas Dependencies of the Schöneberg Poetry Miners’ Guild.

Publications:
Einzimmerspringbrunnenbuch, luxbooks 2009
a|k|va|res, Felicita Cartonera 2010
Tablettenzoo, luxbooks 2013
Äkste & Änkste denxte, Fadel&Fadel2017

Auszeichnungen:
Prize of the City of Münster for International Poetry (as translator of Charles Bernstein) 2015

Jan Škrob (b. 1988 in Prague) is one of the biggest discoveries in Czech poetry of recent years. He is a poet and translator and published his debut collection Pod dlažbou (Under the Pavement) in 2016. His apocalyptic visions recall the great poets of the past. Škrob is both a radical leftist and a committed christian, and his poetry is traditional and formal. He might manage in his committed and autonomous way to heal the split that has opened up in Czech poetry over the past decade. In his work, deep faith meets conflict and reality, misunderstanding and doubt. In 2017 Škrob was nominated for the DILIA Litera, the first collection prize of the Magnesia Litera. He has translated various poets, mainly from English, including Wole Soyinka and Denise Levertov.
A second collection by Škrob is forthcoming in 2018. In his new poems he places a greater focus borrowed from spoken word on the oral and performative moment that is playing an increasing role in current Czech poetry.

Publications:
Pod dlažbou, Eman 2016

Tom Bresemann (b. 1978 in Berlin) writes, organises and conceives poetry and literature from writers’ conferences to talk and reading series to new formats for literature. In 2006 he founded the Lettrétage in Berlin-Kreuzberg together with Moritz Malsch and Katharina Deloglu and is still involved in it. His own texts have been appearing since 2004 in magazines and anthologies such as randnummer, poet, Lyrik von Jetzt 2, Jahrbuch der Lyrik und Wat los, Parzen?. He has published three books of poetry and a novella. Critics called his 2007 book Makellos “cultural heritage and contemporary rage”. Bresemann’s texts have been translated into English, Italian, Swedish, Spanish and Hebrew. His poem ‘von jeglichem wort, das durch den mund den menschen vernewet –duencken und gespanne in häutigem deutsch’ is an ongoing publication in various formats such as poetry clips, memes, audio carriers, exhibitions, live situations, objects, audio and/or video data and sound sequences on various online platforms and in print.

Publications:
Makellos, Verlagshaus J. Frank 2007
in den kellern neuköllns, PapperLaPapp Kartonbuchverlag 2010
Berliner Fenster: Gedichte, Berlin Verlag, 2011
Mitlesebuch 102, Aphaia Verlag 2011
Kein Gesicht, SuKulTur 2012
arbeiten und wohnen im denkmal, luxbooks 2014

Bozena Správcová (b. 1969 in Prague) is a poet and information scientist. From 1993 to 2002 Správcová worked for the literary magazine Tvar, after which she edited the web magazine Postmoderní revue, returning to Tvar in 2005 and staying there until 2012. As well as her literary and publishing work, she is a graphologist and plays the violin. She also paints and has illustrated her own books.
Her poems are complex compositions that almost reach the form of prose. She consciously combines “unpoetic” motifs, neologisms and colloquial language and is a proponent of postmodern writing in the Czech Republic. Her debut collection, published in 1993, was Guláš z modrý krávy (Goulash from the Blue Cow). More collections of poems followed, as well as two romans à clef satirising the literature industry and a few collections of interviews. She has worked for various publishers since 2013.

Publications:
Výmluva, Český spisovatel 1995
Večeře, Host 1998
Spravedlnost, Host 2000
Požární kniha, Trigon 2003
Východ, Trigon 2011
Strašnice, Trignon 2013
Uctívači kruhů, Trignon 2016

Awards:
Jiří Orten Prize 1996

Birgit Kreipe (b. 1964 in Hildesheim) worked in her home town as a bookseller. She studied Psychology and German Literature in Marburg, Vienna and Göttingen and now lives and works in Berlin as a psychotherapist and writer. Birgit Kreipe’s poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies, most recently in ‘alles hier, Majestät, ist deins: Lyrik im Anthropozän’ in 2016. In the same year her acclaimed most recent collection SOMA was published. In her poems she creates image spaces in which fairytale motifs, archaeological traces, memories and imagination weave in and out of each other. Her poems were described as “fairytale-like, dreamlike and enigmatic” by Andreas Heidtmann in the citation for the award of the 2014 Munich Poetry Prize. She has also been awarded a literature fellowship by the Berlin Senate in 2016 and was a writer-in-residence at the Slovenia Book Days in Ljubljana and Kranj in Slovenia in 2017.

Publications:
wenn ich wind sage, seid ihr weg, fixpoetry2010
schönheitsfarm, Verlagshaus J. Frank 2012
SOMA, kookbooks 2016

Awards:
Munich Poetry Prize 2014
Irseer Pegasus 2014

Marie Šťastná (b. 1981 in Valašské Meziříčí) is one of the most important women poets to have emerged on to the Czech literary scene around 2000. From a female perspective looks critically and empathetically at inter-personal relationships. She has a degree in Art History and History of Culture from the University of Ostrava. She has published four volumes of poetry to date. Šťastná does not write a lot; when her new collection is published in 2019, nine years will have passed since the last one. She was awarded the Dresden Poetry Prize in 2010. Marie Šťastná lives in Prague and earns her living as a clothing and jewellery designer.

Publications:
Jarním pokrytcům, Unarclub 1999
Krajina s Ofélií, Knižnice Ortenovy Kutné Hory2003
Akty, Protis 2006
Interiéry, Host 2010

Awards:
Jiří Orten Prize 2004
Dresden Poetry Prize 2010

Carl-Christian Elze (b.1974 in Berlin) studied Medicine, Biology and German Literature at the University of Leipzig from 2004 to 2008 was a student at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. From 2002 to 2009 he co-edited the literature magazine plumbum, which won the V.O. Stomps Prize of the City of Mainz in 2007. Carl-Christian Elze writes poems, prose, scripts and libretti. He wrote the script for the short film Atropos which won first prize at the Kurzsüchtig Film Festival in 2011. His poems combine matter and metaphysics. Concrete motifs from nature and the animal kingdom are apparently ancillary theatres in a poetic construction that brings The Greater Good into the light and imparts knowledge of the fragility of life with impressive tenderness.
Several collections of Carl-Christian Elze’s poems have been published since 2006 as well as contributions to literature magazines and anthologies such as EDIT, Lyrik von Jetzt 2 and Jahrbuch der Lyrik. Elze is a member of German PEN. He has run the niemerlang reading series in Leipzig with Janin Wölke, Udo Grashoff, Mario Salazar and Christian Kreis since 2013.

Publications:
stadt/ land/ stopp, Mitteldeutscher Verlag 2006
Oda und der ausgestopfte Vater. Zoogeschichten. kreuzer books 2018
gänge, CVB 2009
olsztyn-allenstein-express, heinemann presse 2012
ich lebe in einem wasserturm am meer, was albern ist, luxbooks 2013
Aufzeichnungen eines albernen Menschen, Verlagshaus Berlin 2014
diese kleinen, in der luft hängenden, bergpredigenden gebilde, Verlagshaus Berlin2016

Awards:
Poetenladen Debut Collection Prize
Finalist in Open Mike 2005
1st Prize Irseer Pegasus 2006
Munich Poetry Prize 2010
Joachim Ringelnatz New Poets’ Prize of the City of Cuxhaven 2014
2016 Federal Government Fellowship in the German Study Centre, Venice