ELK4 — 02. - 04. September / Ottmar-Pohl-Platz

Das Europäische Literaturfestival Köln-Kalk geht ins vierte Jahr. Mit unseren diesjährigen Gästen kommen sechs mehrfach ausgezeichnete Autor*innen nach Köln und bringen Literatur auf Ukrainsch, Polnisch, Litauisch, Griechisch, Kurdisch und Albanisch auf die beiden ELK-Bühnen. Das ELK bleibt ein Festival mit utopischem Ansatz: Für ein gemeinsames und offenes Europa, für Austausch statt Abschottung. 2022 fragen wir ganz explizit nach dem “politischen Gedicht”. Was können Lyrik und Prosa zu dieser europäischen Utopie beisteuern? Ist das überhaupt ihre Aufgabe? Mit dem Qamar aus Wien, der Stadtführer*in aus Köln und sieben ehemaligen ELK-Autor*innen aus 6 Ländern kommen weitere internationale Gäste nach Kalk, um die Frage nach Europa zu beantworten. Insofern bleibt das Festival vielstimmig, offen utopisch und utopisch offen. Open Air und Eintritt frei.

Artists 2022

Jazra Khaleed

Jazra Khaleed is a poet, translator, and filmmaker. He lives in Athens and he writes exclusively in Greek. His works are an indictment of fascism, social injustice, police brutality, and racism in contemporary Greece.

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His most recent publications are Requiem für Homs (parasitenpresse, Germany, 2022), Requiem pour Homs et autres poèmes (Marges en Pages, France, 2022) and The Light That Burns Us (World Poetry Books, USA, 2021). His poems have been widely translated and have appeared in The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, World Literature Today, Lichtungen, Manuskripte, Die Horen and other publications.
As a founding editor of the Athenian poetry magazine Teflon, and particularly through his own translations published there, he has introduced to a Greek readership the works of Barbara Köhler, Bert Papenfuß, Kai Pohl, Ann Cotten and Clemens Schittko.
His short films have been screened at international festivals across the world.

Jelena Jeremejewa

Yelena Yeremeyeva is an artist, author and documentary film director. In her films "Der Ernst des Lebens" (SWR) and "Irgendwo dazwischen" (WDR) she addressed issues of systemic educational injustice and inequality of opportunity among young people with migration experience. Her work is connected to her personal history.

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Today, she conducts film workshops at schools in cooperation with various sponsors to sensitise children to radical diversity in addition to anti-Semitism and racism. Most recently, she wrote about divergent memory narratives within the heterogeneous Jewish community in "New Judaism - Old Remembering?" Current works are at the interface between research and art and address the questions of the power of counterfactual historical narratives within post-socialist cultures in Eastern Europe. She completed her PhD at Bauhaus University Weimar on the invisibility of trauma as an individual and collective experience in Russian documentary film of the 1990s-2000s in 2019. She teaches documentary film practice at the Bauhaus University Weimar and at the Hochschule Darmstadt.

Shpëtim Selmani

Shpëtim Selmani, born 1986, is a writer and actor from Kosovo. His books include: Shënimet e një Grindaveci (Incendiary Notes, 2015), Selected Poems 2010-2017 - Poetry in Time of Blood and Despair (Multimedia, Prishtina, 2017) and the present Libërthi i dashurisë (Notebook of Love), published by Armagedoni in Prishtina in 2019. For this, he was awarded one of the European Union's literary prizes in 2020.

Ronya Othmann

Ronya Othmann was born in Munich in 1993. She works as a freelance author, writes columns, poetry, prose and essays, and has been awarded the MDR Literature Prize, the Caroline Schlegel Prize for Essay Writing, and the Audience Prize of the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition, among others.

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Since 2021 she has written the column "Import Export" for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and the column "Leipziger Stimmen" for the Leipziger Volkszeitung. In 2020, Hanser published her novel "Die Sommer", for which she was awarded the Mara Cassens Prize. Her poetry collection "die verbrechen" followed in 2021, for which she received the Orphil Debut Prize.

Krzysztof Siwczyk

Krzysztof Siwzik, born in 1977, is a poet, literary critic, occasional actor, the author about 16 poetry books as well as a poetry pamphlet Długie dno (”The Long Bottom”, 1998) and a book of literary criticism Ulotne obiekty ataku (”Ephemeral Objects of Attack”, Instytut Mikołowski, 2010).

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His poems have been published in all major literary magazines in Poland and abroad. He also played the eponymous role in Lech Majewski’s feature Wojaczek, for which he was nominated for the European Film Academy Award (Paris, 2000). Wydalony (“Expelled”) by Adam Sikora, where he played the main role, premiered at the 2010 Era New Horizons film festival in Wrocław. Since 2000 Siwczyk has been a member of the European Film Academy and the Polish Writers’ Association. He contributes to “Polityka” and “Gazeta Wyborcza”. His reviews are also published in the online edition of “Polityka”. He works at Instytut Mikołowski, where he is the editor of a poetry book series and the literary magazine “Arkadia.”. He lives in Gliwice.

Greta Ambrazaitė

Born 1993 in Vilnius, Greta Ambrazaitė is a Lithuanian poetess, book editor, musician, translator and co-founder of poetry publishing house "Bazilisko ambasada". She studied Philology and holds an MA in Literary Anthropology and Culture from Vilnius University.

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Ambrazaitė's debut poetry collection FRAGILE THINGS („Trapūs daiktai“, 2018) was met with success – generously reviewed by critics and readers, it earned the Young Yotvingian Prize as a best young poet‘s book and was also announced as the Poetry Book of the Year 2018. Also, she was awarded the Young Artistˈs Prize by the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture.

Ambrazaitėˈs poems were translated into 12 foreign languages. She translated into Lithuanian poems by Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Alejandra Pizarnik and others.
Her lo-fi/electronic digital album BLOOD MOUSE („kraujo pelytė“) was released in 2019.
The second volume of poetry ADELA appeared in 2022.