Poesiefestival Berlin 2026

In the organizer's words:

Dante meets heavy metal lettering, a hair straightener hovers over monsters from South American creation myths and the sea goddess Leucothea appears in front of a butterfly framed by antlers - what is happening here?

The festival motifs of this year's Poesiefestival Berlin follow a poetic logic of superimposition: ancient figures appear alongside pop-cultural symbols, mythical bodies are reflected in contemporary forms, meanings shift, multiply and contradict each other. The result is a visual field in which different times, orders of knowledge and aesthetic registers are present simultaneously.

At the heart of this year's program are three major thematic focuses that unfold throughout the festival and to which three evenings are explicitly dedicated: Myth, mourning and a critical de-writing of a mostly white and male-dominated European literary "canon".

All three focal points are linked by the fact that they productively disrupt systems of representation, make power relations visible and find new forms of poetic speech through confrontation and friction. They run through the entire program of the Berlin 2026 Poetry Festival, which takes place from 15 May to 14 June.

From 15 to 31 May, the decentralized festival programme will offer a variety of different formats throughout the city, including film screenings, book premieres, poetic interventions in exhibitions and poetic walks. Events will take place at twelve locations, including the daadgalerie, the PalaisPopulaire, the Museum für Naturkunde, Silent Rixdorf and the Kotti store.

A special highlight will be on Whitsunday, May 24: a world star of poetry, the Canadian poet Anne Carson, will be reading live in Berlin for the first time in almost 20 years at the Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg. Her work is particularly connected to this year's festival themes, as myth, mourning and the examination of canonical traditions repeatedly overlap in her work. Referring to her most recent book Wrong Norma, she writes:

"Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantanamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget's Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night, Sokrates, writing sonnets, forensics, encounters with lovers, the word 'idea', the feet of Jesus, and Russian thugs. The pieces are not linked. That's why I've called them 'wrong'."

From June 2, the festival will be concentrated at silent green in Berlin-Wedding, where, in addition to large thematic evenings, numerous other readings and talks, Weltklang - Night of Poetry with seven international poets and the Berlin Speech on Poetry, which this year will be held by the Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort, will take place. In addition, the festival offers free readings by more than 50 poets on the silent green meadow on two weekends (June 6/7/13).

In the thematic festival evenings, four poets will first dedicate themselves to myths as living narrative forms at Writing Myth (Tue, 9.6.). The oldest myths in particular, handed down orally over the centuries, have always been characterized by change and variation. In the poems of this evening, mythical figures appear in new contexts, stories are rewritten, shifted or re-interrogated where contemporary updates have been lacking until now.

Re-Writing a Canon (Wed, 10.6.) places a mostly white and male-dominated "canon" of European literature itself at the center of the discussion. Deliberately subversive paraphrases, shifts and appropriations show: This supposed canon is not a self-contained entity, but a historically evolved structure from which contemporary meaning can only emerge through constant critical questioning.

At Writing Grief (Thu, 11.6.), texts and poets ask how loss is inscribed in language and the body and what poetic speech can achieve when grief dissolves familiar orders. How can we continue to write when the self-evident becomes fragile? What new linguistic spaces open up as a result of such deep shocks?

Early bird pre-sales with a limited number of tickets for selected events have already begun, while regular pre-sales for the entire festival will start in April 2026.