16/10: minor impromptu 1

venue: desirelines books, 19.30

Fraenkelufer 28, 10999 Berlin

Subway: U8/U3 Kottbusser Tor; U8 Schöleinstraße; U7 Südstern

readers:

Alexander Booth is a poet & translator who has lived in Berlin for the past decade after many years in Rome. His work has appeared in publications such as A Public Space, Beloit Poetry Journal, Chicago Review, New England Review, and World Literature Today, among others. His translations include work by Friederike Mayröcker, Alexander Kluge, Sandro Penna, Gerhard Rühm, Lutz Seiler, and a new translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”.

Lauren Oyler is the author of the novel Fake Accounts and the essay collection No Judgment. She is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine and writes for many other publications. She lives in Berlin.

Fionn Petch was born in Scotland. His debut translated work of fiction, Luis Sagasti’s Fireflies, was shortlisted for the 2018 TA First Translation Prize. His second, Renato Cisneros’ The Distance Between Us, received a PEN Translates Award. In 2021, his translation of Sagasti’s A Musical Offering was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and went on to win the Society of Authors’ Premio Valle Inclán for best translation from Spanish published in the UK that year. In 2021, he became Senior Editor at Charco Press.

Ryan Ruby’s essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times, Bookforum, the New Left Review and elsewhere. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Harper’s, The Drift, Iterant, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. He is the author of a book-length poem, Context Collapse, which was a Finalist for the 2020 National Poetry Series, a Semi-Finalist for the 2020 Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Best Books of 2024. It was published in November 2024 by Seven Stories Press. He is currently at work on a nonfiction narrative book about Berlin called Ringbahn for Farrar Straus, and Giroux.

17/10 minor impromptu 2

venue: Galerie Linger, 14.00

Boppstraße 2, Souterrain links, Kreuzkölln, 10967 Berlin

Subway: U8 Schönleinstraße

readers:

David Hering is a writer, critic and academic based in Liverpool, England. His fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Point, Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The London Magazine, 3:AM,  and others. He is the author of David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Holding The Ghost: A History of the Contemporary (forthcoming). In 2019 he was shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize and in 2020 the Northern Book Prize. 

Morten Høi Jensen is the author of The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain (Yale University Press, 2025) and A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen (Yale University Press, 2017). His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, Liberties, The Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, and Commonweal, among other publications. He currently works as the European Liaison for Liberties: A Journal of Culture and Politics. In 2026, he served as a Consulting Editor to Granta 175: Scandinavia.

Lucy A. Kulwieć is a writer from London, UK. She was offered the only fully funded bursary place on GRANTA magazine’s Memoir Writing Workshop 2024. Her short stories have recently been published in Press 11:11’s inaugural Nothing Exists Alone series, seeking fresh perspectives on climate change, and The EcoTheo Review. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London and BA in English Literature from the University of East Anglia.  

Jared Marcel Pollen is the author of The Unified Field of Loneliness (2019) and Venus&Document (2022). His work has appeared in The New Statesman, The Nation, The New Republic, Liberties, Poetry Magazine, The Point, Commonweal and elsewhere. He lives in Prague.

Isabella Streffen is an artist currently based in the United Kingdom, exploring intimacy; the poetics, politics and cultural histories of perception; and experimental art criticism. She is interested in how and why we sense things and what we say and feel about them. Her expansive practice moves between text, moving image, audio, objects, site-specific work and exhibition-making.

17/10 minor incident

venue: Lettrétage, 19.30

Veteranenstraße 21, 10119 Berlin

Subway: U8 Rosenthaler Platz; Tram: 12, M8 Brunnenstr. /Invalidenstraße, 50, M1 Rosenthaler Platz; Bus: 142, N8, N40 Rosenthaler Platz

readers:

Gabriel Flynn‘s debut novel, Poor Ghost! is out now with Sceptre Books. His writing has appeared in Five Dials, Best British Short Stories, Review 31, and Lighthouse Journal, and he was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize in 2020.

Martin Lechner was born in 1974, and studied philosophy and literature at the University of Potsdam. He lives in Berlin. His debut novel Kleine Kassa was longlisted for the 2014 German Book Prize and his collection of stories Nach fünfhundertzwanzig Weltmeertagen was shortlisted for the 2017 Clemens Brentano Prize. Der Irrweg (2021) was funded by the Berlin Senate. Die Verwilderung (2025) is his third novel.

Donna Stonecipher is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Ruins of Nostalgia, which was named a best book of 2023 by NPR, and Transaction Histories, which was listed by The New York Times as one of the 10 best poetry books of 2018. She has also published one book of criticism, Prose Poetry and the City. Her poems have been translated into seven languages. She translates from German, and her translation of Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker’s trilogy études, cahier, and fleurs, for which she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, is being published by Seagull Books. Forthcoming in 2027 is a narrated nonfiction book, The Secret Life and Death of Ornament in Berlin (MIT Press).

May-Lan Tan is the author of the short story collection Things to Make and Break and the chapbook Girly. She has been awarded the Berlin Senate grant for non-German literature and a fellowship at Yaddo. Her fiction has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, the Atlas Review, the Reader, and Areté.

photography:

Alex Cocotas is a writer and artist in Berlin.

panel:

James Conway was born in Sydney and now lives in Berlin where he is a translator from German to English, both commercial and literary. In the latter capacity he has translated and published eight books for Rixdorf Editions, most recently Three Prose Works by Else Lasker-Schüler. He has written for publications such as the Times Literary Supplement and the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as his own repository of alternative cultural history, Strange Flowers.

Ann Cotten was born in Iowa in 1982, grew up in Vienna. She has been living in Berlin since 2006.For her first poetry collection, Fremdwörterbuchsonette (2007), she was awarded the Reinhard Preissnitz Prize and the Clemens Brentano Prize for Literature of the City of Heidelberg. For Florida-Räume (2010) she received the Hermann Hesse Literature Prize. In 2014, Ann Cotten was awarded the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize; in 2015, she was the first recipient of the newly founded Klopstock Prize for Contemporary Literature. In 2017, she was awarded the Hugo-Ball-Prize for her oeuvre.

Susan Finlay is the author of the novels The Ultraviolet Catastrophe, The Jacques Lacan Foundation, My Other Spruce & Maple Self, Objektophila, and Arriviste, and the anti-memoir, The Lives of the Artists. ​Susan was an associate editor at JOAN; founded the Coelacanth Press with Phoebe Blatton, where she co-edited four editions of the biannual journal; and founded the independent publisher MOIST, with her father, Paul Finlay, which she co-ran until Summer 2025. She lives in Berlin.

moderator:

Ben Libman‘s first book, The Third Solitude: A Memoir Against History, came out last year with Dundurn Press. His next,Voyeur, will be out with Coach House Books in 2027. His essays, reviews, and creative work have been featured in places likeThe New York Times,Poetry Magazine,The Yale Review,New Left Review,The London Magazine, andThe Guardian.