10 Jahre LAND IN SICHT

In the organizer's words:

On October 17, our reading series LAND IN SIGHT celebrates its tenth anniversary - and also its end. The October 17th edition will be the last in the series.

We are delighted that four wonderful authors - Martin Piekar, Leyla Bektas, Mirjam Kay Mashkour and Patrik Peyn - have confirmed their participation for the evening.

Come along and celebrate a great literary evening with us at Kulturraum405.

Start is at 8 pm. Admission from 7:30 pm on a donation basis.

About the authors:

Leyla Bektaş was born in 1988 and grew up in Bremen as the daughter of a German mother and a Turkish father. She studied Romance languages and literature in Cologne, with stops in Bordeaux and Mexico City, and later literary writing in Leipzig. She has taught Spanish-language literature, German as a foreign language and regularly gives seminars on creative writing. Her texts have appeared in various magazines and anthologies. For her first novel "Wie meine Familie das Sprechen lernte" (Nagel und Kimche, Autumn 2024), she received the Bremen Author's Scholarship.

Martin Piekar, born in '90, studied philosophy and history at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. Lives and works from Frankfurt. He was a scholarship holder of the Lower Saxony Foundation in 2010. In 2012 he was poetry prize winner at the 20th Open Mike. In 2014 he became World Poetry Wrestling Champion. In 2018 he received the Irseer Pegasus jury prize and the Alfred Gruber Prize in Merano. 2020 he is a scholarship holder of the Hausacher LeseLenz e.V. and the Hessischer Literaturrat. 2021 on the shortlist of the Munich Poetry Prize. 2023 he won the Kelag Prize and the Audience Prize at the Days of German Literature, the renowned Bachmann competition. His first volume of poetry "Bastard Echo" was published in spring 2014 by Verlagshaus Berlin, already in its second edition. His second volume of poetry, "AmokperVers", was published in 2018 and went into its second edition in 2023. His third volume of poetry "livestream & leichen" was also published in 2023, also by Verlagshaus Berlin.

Mirjam Kay Mashkour (*1992), known as Mkay, is an author and activist from Aachen. She studied creative writing and cultural journalism at the Literaturinstitut Hildesheim as well as European political science and law in Bologna and Rome. Alongside her studies, Mashkour worked as a journalist and kept her head above water with sometimes absurd jobs, which often inspire her texts. For her debut novel Star Girl Space Boy (LeeBooks, October 2024) and the work on her second novel, Arrivist, Mashkour received the Rolf-Dieter-Brinkmann-Stipendium 2024. Mashkour is an elected representative of Aachen's independent literary scene and a member of the Euregio Meuse-Rhine Literature Office.

Patrik Peyn was born in the province of Lower Saxony sometime after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before September 11th. These major world-historical events did not shape his youth for the most part, but this is the time frame in which he grew up. More formative was and is the loneliness, the distance of some atoms from each other, sitting too far forward in the movie theater; driving as well as inhibiting factors of his work. Nevertheless, he writes & writes & writes. Mainly poetry, for example as part of his diploma thesis for his studies at the KHM Cologne. This year he produced the poetry collection "die leere in der orangerie. oder: das scheitern der welt, durchs glashaus betrachtet".

Design: Mario Frank

We would like to thank the Cultural Office of the City of Cologne and the Kunststiftung NRW for their kind support.