Programme

Marianne Gareis

Marianne Gareis was born in southern Germany. She studied Latin American Studies, English and Ethnology, and now lives in Germany and Portugal. Since 1989, she has been translating literature from Portuguese and Spanish, including works by authors such as José Saramago, Gonçalo M. Tavares, Joaquim Machado de Assis, Eça de Queirós, Lídia Jorge, Tatiana Salem Levy, Samanta Schweblin and Aroa Moreno Durán. In 2014, she was awarded the Straelen Translation Prize by the Kunststiftung NRW, and in 2019 she received the Hieronymusring from the Association of Literary Translators.

Photo: private

Mirko Kraetsch

Mirko Kraetsch, born in Dresden in 1971, translates from Czech and Slovak across all literary genres. He hosts readings, gives lectures, and leads workshops. He volunteers on the board of the VdÜ and with Weltlesebühne e. V., and is also a member of the Munich Translators’ Forum, the Austrian Forum for Literary Translation, and the Slovak association DoSlov. Among others, he has translated works by Michal Tallo, Marek Torčík, Iva Procházková, Markéta Pilátová, Irena Dousková, Michal Hvorecky, Peter Krištúfek, Emil Hakl, and Bianca Bellová into German.

Photo: Andrea Schuh

www.worte-und-orte.de

Frank Heibert

Frank Heibert, born in Essen in 1960, lives in Berlin with his husband, Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel, and works as a literary and theatre translator. He has translated approximately 120 works of prose and 120 plays from English, French, Italian, and Portuguese, including works by Don DeLillo, Richard Ford, William Faulkner, George Orwell, George Saunders, Neil LaBute, Tony Kushner, Boris Vian, Raymond Queneau, Marie Darrieussecq, Yasmina Reza, Aldo Busi, Curzio Malaparte, and Jorge de Sena. He also works as a lecturer, author (novels, essays), critic, host, and jazz singer. He is the recipient of numerous translation awards.

Photo: Christa Holka

Hélène Thiérard

Hélène Thiérard (born in 1982) lives in Berlin, where she works as a literary translator and scholar.

She translates into French (including works by Raoul Hausmann, Franz Kafka and Günter Brus) and is a board member of Weltlesebühne e.V. After completing her PhD, she taught and conducted research at the Sorbonne (Paris), the IFK (Vienna) and Saarland University. She is currently based at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research interests include multilingual cognition and literary translation.

She has recently published two articles in TTR. Current book project: Politics of Language After Universalism, co-edited with Chris Song.

Photo: Hélène Thiérard/ private

Henning Bochert

Henning Bochert (born in 1969) is a German author, dramaturg and state-certified and authorised translator for English and German, based in Berlin.

After graduating with a degree in acting from the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) in 1994, he has been working for around 30 years as a theatre and literary translator, translating works by authors such as Eve Leigh, Dawn King, Carlos Murillo and Adam Rapp into German, and works by Christoph Hein and Ingrid Lausund into English.

Most recently, he was the translator and editor of Die Rose im Sand (Dörlemann, 2023). He has been a member of Drama Panorama: Forum für Übersetzung und Theater e. V. since 2009, where he regularly organises and hosts events. In 2023, he co-curated the literary translation festival “translationale berlin”.

www.henningbochert.de

Photo: Graham Hains

Nadine Püschel

Nadine Püschel studied literary translation in Düsseldorf. Since 2008, she has been working as a freelance translator of literature and audiovisual media from English, French, and Turkish, and leads workshops for university and high school students. As a member of the Junge Weltlesebühne, she also regularly reads from her translations of children’s and young adult books at schools and libraries in Berlin.

Photo: Ebba Drolshagen

Lisa Wegener

Lisa Wegener, born in Leipzig in 1982, translates literature and theatre texts from English, French, and Dutch into German. As a stage translator, she works on productions at municipal theatres, in the independent theatre scene, and on tour, most recently focusing primarily on the works of Rébecca Chaillon. Together with Charlotte Bomy, she edited the anthologies Afropäerinnen – Theatertexts from France ans Belgium (2021) and Surfing Through Undefined Terrain: International Queer Drama (2022) and is currently working on a volume on narratives for the future. She is a member of Drama Panorama: Forum for Translation and Theater e. V. and is a co-founder of the translators’ collective buerozwei.berlin. As a seminar leader and guest lecturer, she teaches, among other things, non-dogmatic, anti-discriminatory approaches, surtitling skills, and practical professional knowledge.

Photo. Leona Goldstein

schreiben&lebenExTRA

The schreiben&lebenExTRA project supports Berlin writers by providing advice, mentoring, information, networking and advertising. The offer is aimed at authors, translators, editors, book designers, literary organizers and other solo freelancers in the literary industry.

www.literaturszene.berlin/about/

Charlotte Bomy

Charlotte Bomy has been working as a freelance literary and theatre translator, editor, and curator in Berlin since 2012. She has many years of experience in international project work, translation brokerage, and curating literary events. Since 2018, she has worked regularly as a consultant and has served, among other roles, as a transnational guide for the Performing Arts Program Berlin. Together with Lisa Wegener, she edited the anthologies Afropäerinnen: Theater Texts from France and Belgium (2021) and Surfing Through Undefined Terrain: International Queer Drama (2022), published by Neofelis Verlag. For her work, she has received, among other honours, a visiting lecturer position from the German Translators’ Fund at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (winter semester 2022/23) and the Berlin Senate’s scholarship for translators in the field of literature (2025).

Photo: Charlotte Bomy/ private

Claudia Hamm

Claudia Hamm, born in Jena in 1969, lives in Berlin and works as a literary translator, author, and theatre director. She has received numerous awards for her translations from French. Her most recent publication is a translation of Emmanuel Carrère’s Je suis vivant et vous êtes morts. Philip K. Dick 1928–1982, under the title Ich lebe und ihr seid tot: Die Parallelwelten des Philip K. Dick (2025). She is a co-founder of the translationale berlin festival and teaches at various universities. In 2023, Claudia Hamm initiated the Working Group on Literary Translation and AI, which, together with the literary translators’ associations of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (D-A-CH), published the Manifesto for Human Language. In 2024, she edited the Akzente issue Automatensprache.

Photo: Michael Donath

Chantal Wright

Chantal Wright, born in 1975 in Manchester (England), is a literary translator and Professor of Creativity and the Language Industry at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW). She translates from German and French into English, has been awarded the Cliff Becker Book Prize amongst other honours, and founded the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Wright is the author of the academic handbook Literary Translation (Routledge, 2016) and has taught at several international universities. Her translations of children’s books were twice nominated for the Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation. She has recently completed, with Simon Pare, the translation of the correspondence between Ingeborg Bachmann and Max Frisch, Wir haben es nicht gut gemacht (Suhrkamp, 2022), forthcoming at the end of 2026 with Seagull Books under the title We didn’t do very well.

Photo: Foto Christa Stocker/ZHAW

Petra Schaper Rinkel

Petra Schaper Rinkel explores how the new comes into the world and how futures become possible. As a political scientist and critical futures researcher, she examines the relationship between politics, technology and the future. She has led European foresight projects at AIT Austrian Institute of Technology. She also set up the Interdisciplinary Digital Lab (IDea_Lab) at the University of Graz as Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Vice-Rector for Digitalisation, and served as its Founding Director. From 2023 to 2025, she served as Rector of the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She now works as an academic at the University of Graz.

Photo: Uni Graz/Kanizaj

https://schaper-rinkel.eu

Maike Albath

Maike Albath (born in 1966 in Braunschweig) is a German literary critic, author and journalist. She studied Romance languages and German language and literature in Berlin and Italy, and wrote her doctoral thesis on the poet Andrea Zanzotto. Since 1993, she has worked as a journalist for Deutschlandfunk and Deutschlandfunk Kultur and has written for publications including the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” and “Die Zeit”. In 2002, her work as a literary critic was honoured with the Alfred Kerr Prize; in 2006, she received the VdÜ Translators’ Award. She has published several non-fiction books on Italian literature and culture, including Der Geist von Turin (2010), Rom, Träume (2013), Trauer und Licht (2019) and Bitteres Blau (2024). She lives in Berlin.

Photo: Michela Di Savino

Alida Bremer

Alida Bremer (born 1959 in Split, Croatia) is a Croatian-German writer, translator, and literary scholar who has lived in Germany since 1986 and currently resides in Münster. She studied comparative literature, Romance languages, Slavic studies, and German language and literature in Belgrade, Rome, Saarbrücken, and Münster, and earned her doctorate in comparative literature. She translates novels, plays, and poetry from Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian, including works by Ivana Sajko, Edo Popović, and Asja Bakić. In 2018, she was awarded the International Literature Prize of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt for Sajko’s “Liebesroman.”. She writes essays, novels, and short stories; her novel „Tesla oder Die Vollendung der Kreise“ was published 2023.

Photo: Edi Matić

Hélène Thiérard

Hélène Thiérard (born in 1982) lives in Berlin, where she works as a literary translator and scholar.

She translates into French (including works by Raoul Hausmann, Franz Kafka and Günter Brus) and is a board member of Weltlesebühne e.V. After completing her PhD, she taught and conducted research at the Sorbonne (Paris), the IFK (Vienna) and Saarland University. She is currently based at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research interests include multilingual cognition and literary translation.

She has recently published two articles in TTR. Current book project: Politics of Language After Universalism, co-edited with Chris Song.

Photo: Hélène Thiérard/ private

Henning Bochert

Henning Bochert (born in 1969) is a German author, dramaturg and state-certified and authorised translator for English and German, based in Berlin.

After graduating with a degree in acting from the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) in 1994, he has been working for around 30 years as a theatre and literary translator, translating works by authors such as Eve Leigh, Dawn King, Carlos Murillo and Adam Rapp into German, and works by Christoph Hein and Ingrid Lausund into English.

Most recently, he was the translator and editor of Die Rose im Sand (Dörlemann, 2023). He has been a member of Drama Panorama: Forum für Übersetzung und Theater e. V. since 2009, where he regularly organises and hosts events. In 2023, he co-curated the literary translation festival “translationale berlin”.

www.henningbochert.de

Photo: Graham Hains

Annette Hug

Annette Hug was born in Switzerland in 1970. She studied history in Zurich and Women and Development Studies in Manila. After working as a lecturer and trade union secretary, she has been a freelance writer since January 2015. rotpunktverlag published Lady Berta in 2008 and In Zeleny’s Room in 2010, while Das Wunderhorn published Wilhelm Tell in Manila (2016) and Tiefenlager (2021). Annette Hug was awarded a Swiss literary prize in 2017. From August 2018 to April 2026, her column “Ein Traum der Welt” appeared in the weekly newspaper WOZ. Since 2024, she has been publishing translations from Filipino (Tagalog) into German, including the novels Das Meer der Aswang by Allan N. Derain and Die 70er by Lualhati Bautista.

Photo: Ah Bührer

Kollektiv Kunst & Krawall

Kunst & Krawall is a FLINTA*-led poetry slam collective, which is committed to promoting gender equity and diverse representations both on and off the stage. They have been organising shows and event series in cafés and bars, as well as in bigger clubs and event venues in and around Berlin since 2022. They also support emerging artists on the poetry slam scene through workshops and performance opportunities.

Lisa Pauline Wegner

Lisa Pauline Wagner is a theatre director and poetry slammer from Berlin. In 2022, she completed her degree in directing at the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre. She was runner-up in the German-language poetry slam championship in 2022, and won the Berlin-Brandenburg championship in 2023 and 2026. In 2024, she represented Germany at the European and World Championships. In 2025, she wrote and directed the stage adaptation of Lucia Zamolo’s Und dann noch … wie Stress weniger stresst, fast ohne Toxic Tips at the Theater Münster; in 2026, the production was staged at the Westwind Theatre Festival.

Photo: Lennart Neuhaus

Aidin Halimi

Aidin Halim is an author and poetry slammer. Born and raised in Iran, he emigrated to Germany at the age of sixteen. He studied German literature and history, began performing on stage in 2015, and won the Berlin/Brandenburg Poetry Slam Championships in 2021, having finished as runner-up in 2019.
His debut novel In den Flügeln das Licht was published in March 2026 by Gutkind-Verlag, and his collection of stories Hinundherkunft. Storys eines voll durchintegrierten was published in 2024 by Satyr-Verlag. His work has also appeared in numerous anthologies and newspapers.
He is a member of the poetry reading group “Fuchs & Söhne” and a writer for the news programme “FunFacts”.

Photo: AA Fotografie

Inke Sommerlang

Inke Sommerlang is a slam poet and presenter, and is currently completing her PhD in speech science. She lives in Berlin and performs on stages throughout the German-speaking world. In 2023, she was crowned Saxony’s state champion in poetry slam. Her texts are sometimes loud, critical and ironic, sometimes sensitive and compassionate, but above all, they are always one thing: honest. Inke Sommerlang wears her heart on her sleeve, and that is exactly what you hear when she takes to the stage.

Photo: Photojunge

Birdy (Moderation)

Birdy is a poetry slammer, presenter and writing tutor from Berlin. For years, she has been performing on stage as an artist and hosting poetry slams and cultural events. As part of the Berlin-based events collective Kunst&Krawall, she organises various regular event series in the capital and will also be hosting this event with confidence and her keen sense of timing and audience engagement.

Photo: Petra Weixelbraun

Meral Şimşek

Meral Şimşek is a Kurdish writer and poet from Diyarbakır. In addition to her Turkish-language works in the genres of poetry, the novel and short prose, her German-language collection of poems Feigenflecken was published in 2023; she is also featured in numerous international anthologies. She has been living in exile in Berlin since 2022 due to political persecution for her works.

She is a member of PEN Berlin and serves as co-spokesperson for the Kurdish Institute in Germany (Berlin). In addition to receiving numerous awards – including the Theodor Kramer Prize (2022) – she runs writing workshops in Berlin and continues her own literary work.

Photo: Meral Şimşek/ private

Mustafa Gündoğdu

Mustafa Gündoğdu was born in Dersim and now lives in London. For over 20 years, he worked as a coordinator for various human rights and conflict resolution NGOs, where, amongst other things, he contributed to over 100 books and articles as an in-house translator. Since then, he has worked as a freelance editor and proofreader on Kurdish translations, including Sara: My Whole Life Was a Struggle by Sakine Cansız. Among other works, he has translated the short story Cleaners of the World by Hüseyin Karabey for the Kurdistan +100 anthology, which won the 2021 PEN Translates Award. He is also the founder and former coordinator of the London Kurdish Film Festival and has organised Kurdish film festivals in London, New York, Dublin, Glasgow, Istanbul and Busan.

Photo: private

Dawid Yeşîlmen

Dawid Yeşîlmen was born in Mêrdîn in 1984. He graduated from a college of education in Turkey; while initially working as a teacher, he also completed his master’s degree in the Department of Kurdish Language and Culture at Mardin Artuklu University. In 2016, he moved to Germany and completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Duisburg-Essen, which examined how the 1915 genocide is depicted in Kurdish fiction published after 2000. From 2014 to 2021, he worked as an editor for the Kurdish literary journal Wêje û Rexne, published in Amed. In addition to this role, he works as a freelance translator and editor. In 2024, he co-curated the Kurdish exile literature festival Dengê min tê te? with Beliban zu Stolberg at Literaturhaus Berlin. He currently works as an anti-discrimination counsellor.

Photo: private

Karen Nölle

Karen Nölle (born in 1950 in Hamburg) is a German translator, editor, and author. After studying English, Romance Languages, German and Philosophy in Hamburg, Aachen and Berkeley, and teaching for eight years at RWTH Aachen University, she became a freelance translator in 1984. She translates from English, mainly works by female authors, among others Ursula K. Le Guin, Alice Munro, Doris Lessing, and Annie Dillard. From 2009 to 2019, she worked as an editor at “edition fünf”. In 2022–23, she held the August Wilhelm von Schlegel Visiting Professorship. in 2024 and 2026 she was awarded the Kurd-Laßwitz-Prize for her translations of Ursula K. Le Guin. She lives in the Holsteinische Schweiz region.,

Photo: Julia Fischer

Milena Adam

Milena Adam (born in 1991 in Hamburg) is a literary translator and interpreter from French and English. From 2016 to 2019, she worked as an editor at the Matthes & Seitz publishing house in Berlin. She has translated two novels by Alain Damasio, as well as works by Sandra Newman, Céline Minard, Cal Flyn, Shubhangi Swarup, Phillip B. Williams, and Lucie Rico. She has also translated Ken Kesey’s monumental work Sailor Song — an early example of climate fiction —into German.

Photo: Stefanie Kulisch

Laura Haber

Laura Haber, born in Munich in 1985, is a literary translator from Spanish, French, and Portuguese, as well as an editorial board member of the journal alba.lateinamerika lesen. After earning a master’s degree in Literary Translation from LMU Munich, she participated in the Hieronymus Program of the German Translators’ Fund and the German-French Goldschmidt Program. Among other works, she has translated novels by Osvalde Lewat and Carolina Brown and received a research grant from the Berlin Senate in 2025. She also translates for various festivals and leads translation workshops for adults and young people.

Photo: Santiago Engelhardt

Franziska Muche

Franziska Muche is a theatre translator, editor, dramaturg, and lecturer. She studied languages, economic and cultural studies in Passau, translation and interpreting in Granada, and acting in Berlin. She translates and provides surtitles for plays by Spanish-speaking authors, most recently by Paco Gámez and Manuela Infante. Together with Pilar Sánchez Molina, she also translates into Spanish, most recently works by Maja Zade and Maria Milisavljević. She has received numerous grants, including a Grant of Excellence from the German Translators’ Fund. She directs the staged reading series Ambigú at TuD Berlin.

Photo: Lolo Vasco

www.franziskamuche.de

Lars Schmeink

Dr. Lars Schmeink is a freelance media and cultural studies scholar and the founder of the Society for Fantastic Studies, which he chaired for 10 years. He earned his doctorate from Humboldt University in Berlin and has served as a visiting professor in Cincinnati and Leeds. His work focuses primarily on science fiction and futurology, and he is an expert on topics at the intersection of technology, society and the future.

Publications (selection): 
Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction (2016), New Perspectives on Contemporary German Science Fiction (published in collaboration with Ingo Cornils, 2022)

Photo: private

https://larsschmeink.de

schreiben&lebenExTRA

The schreiben&lebenExTRA project supports Berlin writers by providing advice, mentoring, information, networking and advertising. The offer is aimed at authors, translators, editors, book designers, literary organizers and other solo freelancers in the literary industry.

www.literaturszene.berlin/about/

Andreas Jandl

Andreas Jandl has been a freelance translator of plays, essays, and prose since 2000. In addition to his translations, he has also published his own works, has served on the jury for several competitions and awards, and has been a guest lecturer at universities twice as part of the “Neustart Kultur” initiative.

Photo: Fondation Jan Michalski, Tonatiuh Ambrosetti

Isabella Hermann

Dr. Isabella Hermann is a German political scientist, science fiction analyst, and speaker based in Berlin. She earned her Ph.D. in International Relations from Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research examines how science fiction reflects new technologies, societal value systems, and global politics —for example, in areas such as artificial intelligence, climate change, and digital transformation. She has conducted research at the Weizenbaum Institute on “Desirable Digital Futures,” among other topics, and has published numerous articles on utopia, dystopia, and narratives of the future. She also works as a consultant, moderator, and workshop leader.

Photo: Kopf & Kragen Fotografie

www.isabella-hermann.de

Luca Homburg

Luca Homburg, born in 1995, studied philosophy, French and translation in Durham, Paris and Vienna. She translates from English, French and Dutch and works as an editor in Frankfurt am Main.

Photo: Luca Homburg/ private

Karla Kutzner

Karla Kutzner is a co-founder of InterKontinental, under the banner of which, for the past eight years, she has run a bookshop, a publishing house, and Berlin’s first book bar, One More Chapter, while also organizing the annual African Book Festival. She is active as a moderator and literary mediator. Since 2023, Karla Kutzner has been coordinating Books at Berlinale, bringing together film rights professionals, producers, and literary creators at the first rights market dedicated to connecting the worlds of literature and film.

www.interkontinental.org

Photo: Jörg Kandziora

Dia Hakim Khaeri

Dia Hakim Khaeri (they/them, b. 2002) is a multidisciplinary artist and budding art critic engaging primarily with performance and the written word as material. Their work is concerned with the intersections of race, gender and queerness, as well as the politics of visibility and identity. To date, they are a member of Playwrights Commune, an independent playwriting collective championing new writing. They are currently based in Singapore, on the Malay peninsula. 

www.climatechangetheatreaction.com

Photo: Dia Hakim Khaeri/ private

Eberhard Köhler

Eberhard Köhler studied directing and acting at the Schauspiel Akademie Zürich. Since 1994, he has staged over 120 productions as a freelance director in Germany and in countries including Switzerland, the United States, Russia, Vietnam, and Kyrgyzstan. From 2005 to 2022, he served on the management team of Teatr Pokoleniy in St. Petersburg. He teaches directing and acting at German and international institutions. Among other honors, he received the Kurt Nylander Theater Prize in Gävle, Sweden, and was nominated for the Golden Mask in Moscow. Publication: “Fundamentals of Acting and Fundamentals of Directing,” in: Ulrike Hentschel (ed.), Teaching Theater: Experimenting with Pedagogy.

Publications: 
Schauspielgrundlagen und Grundlagen der Regie, in: Ulrike Hentschel (Hg.), Theater lehren. Didaktik probieren, Schibri Verlag, 2016.

Die Theaterwelt Eberhard Köhlers – Russischer Dokumentar-Kurzfilm

eberhardkoehler.com

Photo: Elmar Engels

Kumar Muniandy

Kumar Muniandy is a queer, Tamil-Malaysian actor, writer and theatremaker, trained at Guildhall School of Music & Drama, living in Berlin, London and Kuala Lumpur. His work explores migration, colonial history and queerness. Known for his solo play Second Class Queer (premiered in Berlin 2022), which has toured internationally, and I’m Coming For You Anyway. He’s currently translating Second Class Queer into German and developing his new piece, White Talcum Powder.

Jee Chan

Jee Chan (all pronouns) is an artist active across dance and expanded choreography. Characterized by hybridity and syncretism, their practice is concerned with questions surrounding the displaced body and what it can perform, particularly among the contexts of island Southeast Asia. They edited and translated Pantun Baba Chan, the first book of pantuns written in Baba Malay with English translations published in Singapore. They live between Singapore and Berlin.

jeechan

Doris Kouba

Doris Kouba was born in Darmstadt in 1974 to a Sudeten German mother and a Czech father. Having studied at the University of Hamburg (where her studies included West Slavic Studies under poet Antonín Brousek), she now works as a literary translator from English, Czech and Slovak. She has translated novels, short stories, essays, plays and poetry by a number of contemporary Czech authors. She has received several awards for her work. Doris Kouba lives and works in Hamburg, Prague and Hradec Králové, where she plans to establish a centre for literature and translation. She is a member of the VdÜ Assocation of Translators and holds dual Czech and German citizenship. 

Photo: Ondřej Lipár

Sebastian Guggolz

Sebastian Guggolz, born in 1982 on Lake Constance, studied art history, German language and literature, and folklore in Hamburg. After several years as an editor at Matthes & Seitz in Berlin, he founded the multi-award-winning Guggolz Verlag in 2014, where he publishes new works and rediscoveries of forgotten classics from Northern and Eastern Europe in new translations. Since 2022, he has also been on the editorial staff at S. Fischer Verlag, where he is primarily responsible for their classics list. In 2025, he was elected president of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association (Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels).

Photo: Nils Stelte

www.guggolz-verlag.de

Katja Lange-Müller

Katja Lange-Müller (born in 1951 in Berlin Lichtenberg) is a German writer. After completing an apprenticeship as a typesetter, she worked as a photo editor and, among other things, as a nursing assistant on psychiatric wards in Berlin for several years. Beginning in 1979, she studied at the “Johannes R. Becher” Literary Institute in Leipzig; In 1984, she moved to West Germany. She became known for short story collections such as Wehleid, wie im Leben (1986) and novels such as Böse Schafe (2007, shortlisted for the German Book Prize). She has received numerous awards, including the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1986, the Alfred Döblin Prize in 1995, the Wilhelm Raabe Prize in 2008, and the Günter Grass Prize in 2017. She is a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts and a co-founder of PEN Berlin. She lives in Berlin and in the Aargau region of Switzerland.

Photo: Katja Lange-Müller/ private

Krisztina Tóth

Krisztina Tóth (born in 1967 in Budapest) is a Hungarian author and poet who is considered one of the most important voices in contemporary Hungarian literature. She studied Hungarian and French philology at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Since her debut in 1989, she has published numerous poetry collections, novels, and short stories, including Barcode (2007, Sándor Márai Prize) and Aquarium (2013). In 2000, she received the Attila József Prize. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages. Her latest novel, A majom szeme (Eye of the Monkey, 2022), was a huge success with readers. The English edition, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, was longlisted for the International Booker Prize.

Photo: Wavrik Gábor

www.tothkrisztina.com

Timea Tankó

Timea Tankó (born in Leipzig in 1978) is a literary translator who spent her childhood in Hungary and Germany. She studied French, Spanish and Cultural Studies in Leipzig, where she taught Hungarian from 2001 to 2010. Since 2003, she has been working as a freelance literary translator and interpreter from Hungarian and French, translating works by authors including István Kemény, Antal Szerb and György Dragomán. In 2021, she received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for her translation of Miklós Szentkuthy’s Apropos Casanova. In 2026, she was nominated for the prize once again, this time for András Visky’s Die Aussiedlung, for which she was awarded the Helmut M. Braem Prize for Literary Translation and, together with the author, the Prize for Contemporary Literatures in Translation presented by HKW. She lives in Berlin.

Photo: Konstantin Déry

Stephan Szász

Stephan Szász (born in 1966 in Witzenhausen) is an actor who works in theatre, film, and television. After studying at the University of Music and Drama in Hanover, he performed at various theaters in Germany, including the Schauspielhaus Köln, the National Theater Mannheim, the Theater Bremen, the Schaubühne Berlin, the National Theater Weimar, and the Schauspielhaus Zürich. For many years, he has appeared in numerous roles in film and television. Szász has been teaching at the Charlottenburg Acting School since 2014, and since 2023 he has served as artistic director of the “Wege durch das Land” literature and music festival in Ostwestfalen-Lippe. He lives in Berlin.

Photo: Robin Kater

www.stephan-szasz.de

Demetrius

Demetrius is a Berlin-based DJ originally from the United States, known for his dynamic blend of breakbeat, house, electro, and UK Garage. His sets are defined by sharp rhythms, deep grooves, and an instinctive sense for movement on the dance floor. Beyond his solo work, Demetrius is the founder of Groove Circuits, a collective that mirrors his high-energy, forward-pushing ethos. Guided by the motto “All gas, no breaks”, the project champions bold sounds and underground spirit, much like Demetrius’s own musical collection.

Photo: Demetrius Stewart/ private

https://soundcloud.com/stewsilencio