Poesiefestival Berlin 2026: Esther Kinsky

In the organizer's words:

This year's program of the Poesiefestival Berlin (15 May - 14 June) focuses on three major themes: Myth, mourning and a critical de-writing of a mostly white and male-dominated European literary canon.

The festival's decentralized programme on Whitsunday also includes a performance at the Akademie der Künste. The poets Esther Kinsky, Ann Cotten and Anne Carson will be reading from their texts and can be experienced in conversation. The program will be opened by the award-winning writer and translator Esther Kinsky. Her work is characterized by an intensive examination of landscape, history and memory. She will be followed by Ann Cotten, who is considered one of the most idiosyncratic voices in contemporary poetry and who will present her recently published poetry collection Poller. Idylls.

In the evening, Canadian poet Anne Carson will be reading live in Berlin for the first time in 20 years. Her work is particularly linked to this year's festival themes, as myth, mourning and a preoccupation with canonical traditions repeatedly intersect in it.

From June 2, the festival will be concentrated at silent green in Berlin-Wedding, where numerous readings and talks, "Weltklang - Night of Poetry" with seven international poets and the Berlin Speech on Poetry will take place alongside major thematic evenings.

The nest is where it all begins

Reading and talk with Esther Kinsky

In her latest volume of poetry Heim.Statt (Suhrkamp Verlag 2025), a cycle of seven polyphonic and multilingual long poems, Esther Kinsky (born 1956 in Engelskirchen) describes refugee movements across several millennia, national and linguistic borders. The poems are set in remote landscapes inscribed with traces of displacement, homelessness and violence, the "inkling of migrations": such as the Scottish Highlands and Islands, "de-inhabited now / emaciated and / dismantled" after they were forcibly evacuated over two hundred years ago, or the sparsely populated northern Italian karst region, where the men only return home to their wives in the summer.

Each long poem is accompanied by an appendix entitled "Balkan Route", which further condenses the network of literary and mythological motifs that run through the volume in ever new variations and links them to contemporary refugee movements. Birds, for example, are a recurring motif - birds that fly across borders with the souls of the dead under their wings; birds whose tongues are cut out; women who turn into birds, like the sisters Philomele and Prokne.

More important than the exact location of the poems seems to be an overarching reflection on the historical and cultural traces that become visible in the "terrain" formed by humans and on the "nimmerstatt", the home of the spaces in between and vanishing points.

Afterwards: Esther Kinsky in conversation with Nico Bleutge

Price information:

€ 9/7 (plus booking fee) https://literatur-berlin.tickettoaster.de/produkte/4087-tickets-lesung-im-buchengarten-mit-esther-kinsky-akademie-der-kuenste-berlin-am-24-05-2026