Dear audience,
»You are born with your face turned everywhere«. Is that a camera? A robot? A drone? No! Cameras, robots, and drones are not born. Humans, on the other hand, are. From the very beginning we are open and curious about the world around us. We look in every direction. This connects us, no matter where we come from or the material conditions we grow up in. Our festival motto this year speaks of this openness.
We can look in every direction, but do we always want to? It is easy to lose your bearings when you turn your head every which way. As thinking beings, we can consciously decide how to spend our time, where to direct our attention. What we read. This, too, is part of what makes us human.
I remember how excited I was the first time I read something by Dave Eggers. «A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius». There was a promise in that title, and it was fulfilled by a story at once funny and immensely sad, about a young man who loses both parents in a short space of time and takes care of his younger brother. I can still feel that excitement today. Ever since, I have followed what Eggers has written, not always equally convinced, but always eager to see what would come next. This year he is presenting «Contrapposto» at the ILB, a novel about an artist that spans from the 1980s into the present.
I was reading Eggers around the time I spent a few weeks in Berlin in the summer of 2006, just after finishing school. Back then, my boyfriend bought me a black T-shirt in a shop on Torstraße that has long since closed. It showed a turtle, with the words: «Speed Kills». For me, that T-shirt is tied to a particular idea of Berlin. Berlin stands for the decision to grant things their own pace, the pace that art and literature need. The cliché of a life lived in cafés may no longer match the reality for most writers today, but it endures as a dream of the city where a life with art is possible. Slowness is part of that.
It is no coincidence that snails appear in several of the novels you can encounter at our festival this year. Many of the texts also move at a decelerated narrative pace in a more figurative sense. The poems of Dinçer Güçyeter, Petr Hruška, Halyna Kruk, Ben Lerner, and Eileen Myles, for instance, who will be reading at our «Poetry Night». For the first time, part of the program this year leads through the neighborhood of the Berliner Festspiele.
Ben Lerner can be experienced at the festival not only with poems: he also brings along his new novel, which he will present together with the artist Thomas Demand. In «Transcription», the protagonist accidentally destroys his smartphone at the outset — which inevitably has consequences for the plot. What they are, you will find out at the ILB.
Literature is not as fast as the push notifications on our devices. It comes into being over months and years, not in the milliseconds between a prompt and an AI-generated result. The protagonist of Maria Reva’s «Endling», for instance, travels through Ukraine in a van converted into a laboratory, in search of rare snail species that she is trying to protect. A surprising perspective on a country that at the moment appears in the news mostly in connection with war.
The most interesting literature, in any case, does not look for its subjects in the news. In her novel «Chilco» (Tr: Jacob Edelstein), Daniela Catrileo looks from the center of Chile out to its margins: a young Mapuche couple leaves the capital, but on the island of Chilco they do not find the peace and healing they had hoped for. A smell of decay hangs in the air. Decline lurks everywhere in this landscape, and the ghosts of the past will not let the two of them go. A fever dream, a story of friendship and love.
Mariia Niskavaara, Munir Hachemi, and Manik Sarkar tell of places many of us would rather forget. Together with their translators, they will present their novels at «Slaughter: New European Voices» — books about seasonal labor on a chicken farm in southern France, about a slaughterhouse in Finland and a butcher’s shop in the Netherlands. Not always easy fare, but all the more lasting for it.
In Vigdis Hjorth’s «The Good Person of Sandvika», a corner pub in Oslo becomes the meeting place of a community of social outcasts whose lives are suddenly upended by a lottery win. Hjorth is as unsparingly honest as ever. The way she lays bare the vulnerability and the abysses of the human soul made me glad to live in a world where such books are written. Books that you can experience with us at the festival.
I hope to see you in September.
Yours, Simone Schröder
Head of Program
Also good to know:
- We are once again giving away 100 festival passes to authors living in Berlin. Anyone who writes professionally can register here until 23 August 2026 and enter the draw.
- On 5 September our «Graphic Novel Day» takes place. For 5 euros there is a day pass granting access to all comic events and to the Artist Alley.
- Curious about young German-language literature? Then come to our debut evening «Radikal gegenwärtig» with Ilija Matusko and Anna Schapiro.