Uljana Wolf (1979), German poetess and translator, studied German philology, Anglistics and Social Sciences in Berlin and Krakow. Her debut work kochanie ich habe brot gekauft/darling, I bought bread (2005) was awarded the 2006 Peter Huchel Prize. A selection of her further works includes falsche freunde/false friends (2009), her essay, Box Office (2009) and meine schönste lengevitch/my most beautiful language (2013). Her poems have been translated into over 15 languages. Uljana Wolf’s texts center around language itself, an inexhaustible alluvial mass and sensual material in which, for her as a translator, language syntheses and (apparent) disintegration belong. Playing thusly with and on language, her words shift, revealing glimpses of linguistic policies and migration issues which correlate to specific identity ascriptions. When not writing, Uljana instructs and translates, primarily from English and East European languages. She was co-editor of the Jahrbuch für Lyrik/Yearbook of Lyric (2009) and is a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature. She released the essay Wandering Errands in 2016 andher volume of essays, Etymological Gossip. Essays and Speeches was released by kookbooks, Berlin 2021. She received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for this volume in March 2022.

Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich (1948) is a Belarusian writer. Born in the Soviet Republic of Ukraine and raised in the Soviet Republic of Belarus in the 1950s, she is considered one of the most important and influential contemporary representatives of documentary literature. Alexievich studied journalism at Lenin University in Minsk until 1972. Ten years later, she published her first documentary »novel in voices«, entitled The Unwomanly Face of War (1987). The book is the result of over 500 taped interviews with women active in World War II; their stories and the space in history where their (no longer) silence resides. Her documentary novels Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War (1992), Voices from Chernobyl (2006) and Secondhand Time (2013) are intimate confrontations with history’s debacles; the »Soviet Vietnam« in Afghanistan, the aftermath of Chernobyl’s nuclear disaster and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 2015, Svetlana Alexievich received the Nobel Prize in Literature for her works. Among the many honors she has received are the Herder Prize (1999) and the German Book Trade Peace Prize (2013). The author writes in Russian and has lived in Berlin since 2020. In July 2021, she received the German Federal Republic’s Order of Merit. 

Ain Bailey (1970) is a British sound artist and DJ, living and working in London. Her creations bring together various media, synthesized materials and found sounds to compose architectural acoustics. Her work is often shaped by intensive collaborations with performance, sonic and visual artists. Working together with artist Sonia Boyce, her debut installation, Oh Adelaide (2010), has been widely viewed and integrated within numerous events, exhibits, performances, and workshops. In 2019, Ain Bailey was officially recognized with the Oram Award and the Elephant Trust, the latter for her Cubitt Gallery exhibit And We’ll Always Be a Disco in the Glow of Love.

Bailey was a guest professor for Sound at the Kassel Art College during the winter semester 2017/2018. Ain Bailey is currently leading Sonic Autobiography workshops for LGBTQIA+ refugees and asylum seekers.

Don Mee Choi (1962) is a Korean-American poetess and translator. Park Chung-hee’s military dictatorship forced her family to flee South Korea and set out on an arduous journey, gradually finding their way to the United States. The political impacts of divided Korea along with the traumatic web woven by the Vietnam and Korean wars and American colonial policies are major aspects of Don Mee Choi’s literary output, which emerges in the most diverse genres and forms. Her debut volume,The Morning News is Exciting (2010), was followed by two writings, both published in 2014,Petite Manifesto and Freely Frayed. Her second major collection, Hardly War (2016) describes and reflects on her own childhood in South Korea as well as the repercussions of war, drawing on the volume’s photographs taken by her father, a professional war photographer. In addition to her own verse, Don Mee Choi translates modern Korean poetesses – most prominently Kim Hyesoon – earning her the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize (2012) and theGriffin Poetry Prize (2019). In 2019, Don Mee Choi was a DAAD-Artists-in-Berlin fellow. Her most recent poetry collection DMZ Colony was published in 2020 and awarded the United States’ National Book Award for Poetry the same year.

Yan Jun (1973) is a Chinese poet and musician living in Peking. After completing his Chinese Language and Literature studies at the Northwest Normal University, his major focus became the Chinese underground music scene, where he played several pivotal roles. Working some time as a music critic, in 2000, Yan Jun went on to establish his own record company Sub Jam, a label specializing in Chinese alternative music. In 2004, he began working primarily as a musician. Performing around the globe, his live gigs are often suffused with cross-genre improvisations, coherently fusing poetry, electronic music and field recordings of sounds and noises, as he probes into daily life and space – documenting, experimenting. Yan Jun also works as a curator and event organizer, while publishing art books and book-CD compilations as well. His own poems can be found in the German anthology Chinabox. Neue Lyrik aus Volksrepublik/Chinabox. New Lyric Poetry from the People’s Republic (2016), edited by Lea Schneider, which earned the 2017 Recommended Poetry honor from the German Academy for Language and Literature. Lea Schneider also translated into German a selection of Yan Jun’s poems in Internationaler Tag der Reparatur/International Day of Repairs (2016).

Mihret Kebede is an Ethiopian artist and poetess. She graduated from Addis Ababa University's Alle School of Fine Arts and Design in 2007, continuing on to earn her Master's in Art in 2016. In addition to her artistic activities, she organizes both local and international art events and is a founding member and co-organizer of the Addis Video Art Festival. Kebede also participates in jazz and poetry collaborations with performances throughout the country. She has given workshops and seminars at Studio Olafur Eliasson where she held a solo exhibit in 2012.

While attaining her PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Kebede’s current project is entitled Conversing with Silence. Her poems, written in Amharic, have appeared in several anthologies, including Poetry Jazz: Wax and Gold (2020), published by Institut für Raumexperimente e.V. Berlin in collaboration with Tobiya Poetic Jazz, a popular collaborative event in Addis Ababa combining poetry and live music. 

Novels, poetry and plays, Fiston Mwanza Mujila (1981) is a multifaceted Congolese writer living in Graz, Austria and teaching African Literature at the Graz University. His works experiment with genre conventions inspired by Jazz and poetry. His first publications were Poèmes et rêvasseries/Poems and Reveries (2009) and Craquelures/Cracks (2011).Translated into several languages, his debut novel Tram 83 (2014), earned him, in collaboration with the translators Katharina Meyer and Lena Müller, the 2017 International Literature Prize for the German translation. Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s volume of poetry Le fleuve dans le ventre/ Der Fluss im Bauch/ The Belly’s River (2013) is a bilingual (French/German) publication translated by Ludwig Hartinger. In 2018, Fiston Mwanza Mujila took part in the SWR NEW Jazz Meeting. The German Theater Berlin commissioned Mujila’s work Der Garten der Lüste/ The Garden of Delights for a dramatic reading, the premiere of which will take place in November 2021.

Carlos Soto-Román (1977) is a Chilean writer, poet and pharmacist with a master’s in Bioethics. Many of his translations have been published in Chile as well as volumes of his own poetry: La Marcha de los Quiltros/March of the Mutts (1999), Cambio y Fuera/Over and Out (2009) and 11 (2017) – which was honored with the 2018 Santiago Municipal Poetry Prize. As of 2011, his works were also published in the United States: Philadelphia’s Notebooks (2011), Chile Project: [Re-Classified] (2013), The Exit Strategy (2014), Alternative Set of Procedures (2014) and Bluff (2018). Carlos Soto-Román’s poetry is based on the radical realignment of files, lists, entries, and catalogues. He works in the tradition of Heimrad Bäcker’s documentary poetry, attending to materials recording absences that become perfidious witnesses to censorship, political terror and human rights infringements. His poetological principles apply algorithmic procedures, exaggeration or erasure to create spaces echoing with political themes and so, manipulated materials begin to speak. Carlos Soto-Román released his latest work, Common Sense, in 2019 with Make Now Press.

Maria Stepanova (1972) is a Russian poetess and publicist. In 1995, she completed her Literature studies at the Maxim Gorki Literature Institute in Moscow before going on to conduct the cultural internet news journal Openspace.ru from 2007 to 2012. As of 2012, she has been editor-in-chief of colta.ru, an independent forum emphasizing culture and political feuilleton. Her first three volumes of poetry emerged simultaneously in 2001. Her novel Памяти памяти (2014) was translated into German by Olga Radetzkaja as Nach dem Gedächtnis/After Memory (2018), winning the Berlin Bridge, a literature and translation award. Recently nominated for the International Booker Prize, the novel is a work of metafiction, blending narrative, reportage and assembled documents to probe into the prohibition of remembrance and loss of collective Russian memory. An exceptionally engaged author, Stepanova confronts the persistent violence, both past and current, in her homeland. From 2018 to 2019, she was a guest professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin, filling the Siegfried Unseld Professorship for Central and East European Authors seat. Memory, gaps and voices of the dead speaking through the ventriloquism of poetry are dominant themes of two long poems in Der Körper kehrt wieder: Gedichte/The Body Returns (2020), a volume of poetry translated from Russian into German by Olga Radetzkaja.

Anja Utler (1973), German poetess, translator and essayist, studied Slavistics, Anglistics and Speech Training before earning her doctorate on Russian Modernists in 2003 at the Regensburg University. Her first publication, aufsagen/recite was released in1999, followed by a volume of her poetry, münden – entzüngeln/engulf – enkindle (2004), which earned her the Leonce and Lena Prize. Working with both script and sound, her book brinnen (2006) was released with a CD of exemplary text routes spoken by the author. Additional publications include jana, vermacht/jana, bequeathed (2009) andausgeübt. Eine Kurskorrektur/Carried Out. A course correction (2011). Anja Utler recently gained additional recognition for her translation of two Anne Carson works: Decreation. Gedichte, Oper, Essays/Decreation (2014) and Rot. Zwei Romane in Versen/Autobiography of Red (2019). Her numerous literary awards include the 2014 Basel Lyric Prize, the 2016 Heimrad Bäcker Prize, and the 2021 Ernst Meister Prize for Poetry as well as the 2018 Thomas Kling Poetic lectureship at the Bonn University. Her latest work, kommen sehen. Lobgesang/come and see. Hymn was published in autumn 2020 by edition korrespondenzen, Vienna. 

Born in Santiago de Chile, Cecilia Vicuña (1948) is a poet and artist residing primarily in New York since the 1980s. She studied Fine Arts at the University of Chile before attending the Slade School of Fine Arts in London from 1972 to 1973. Her paintings as well as her reputation as an installation and performance artist are internationally recognized. Her work consistently engages with ethics, the Earth’s ecological condition, indigenous heritage and history, with language and memory, dissolution, extinction and exile as her most prominent themes. Cecilia Vicuña’s artworks can be viewed at Tate London and both the Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 2017, she took part in the 14th Documenta in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany. Cecilia Vicuña has published 25 books since 1973, such as The Precarious: The Art & Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña / QUIPOem (1997), El Templo (2001), Sabor A Mí (2007) and Spit Temple (2012). Her latest release Slow Down Fast, a Toda Raja (2019) is a conversation with curator Camila Marambio about decolonization, ecological disasters and eroticism. In April 2022, Cecilia Vicuña will be awarded the Golden Lion of the 59th Biennale di Venezia for her life's work.

Valzhyna Mort (1981) is a poetess and translator who grew up in Belarus and has lived and worked in the United States since 2005. She teaches at Cornell University and writes in English and Belarusian, as well as translating between English, Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish. Her poetry collections are available in translation in Germany, Sweden, and Ukraine. After Factory of Tears (2008) and Collected Body (2011), her latest poetry collection Music for the Dead and Resurrected (2020) won the International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2021. In her work, she continues to engage with her country of origin, Belarus, and uses her own history as a reservoir of images and sounds for her writing. Mort's work has won the Bess Hokin Prize, the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and the Hubert Burda Prize for Young Eastern European Poetry, among others. Valzhyna Mort will perform as a guest at Poetica during the last two days of the festival week.