Biographies 2016

Further contributors:

Antje Kunstmann, born in 1949, studied education, philosophy and sociology and then founded the Weismann Verlag/Frauenbuchverlag in 1976 with Peter Weismann. Since 1990 she has been the director of the publishing house under her own name.

Laia Jufresa, grew up in the cloud forest of Veracruz and spent her adolescence in Paris. In 2001, she moved to Mexico City and discovered she didn’t know how to cross a street. She’s been writing fiction ever since. She is the author of the short story collection The Cornerist and the novel Umami. Her work has been featured in magazines such as Pen Atlas, Words Without Borders and McSweeney’s. In 2015 she was invited by the British Council Literature to be the first ever International Writer in Residence at the Hay Festival in Wales. She was selected as one of the most outstanding young writers in Mexico by the project Mexico20. Her novel Umami was awarded a PEN English Award and it was a laureate for best novel in Spanish at the 2016 Chambéry Festival for First Novels in France.

Moderations:

Thomas Böhm, who was born in Oberhausen in 1968, was the program director of the International Literature Festival Berlin (2012 – 2014), the Swiss appearance at the 2014 Leipzig Book Fair, Iceland’s guest country appearance at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2011 and the Literaturhaus Cologne (1999 – 2010). He has published numerous award-winning audio books and radio plays in addition to books about social reading and readings as an art form. He is currently a host of the radio program Die Literaturagenten on rbb. His long-term project is to bring the shared reading method developed in England to Germany. It is a form of reading that creates community that goes beyond social and cultural boundaries and personal limitations.

Aurélie Maurin, who was born in Paris in 1975, studied literature and linguistics in Paris. She has lived in Berlin since 2000, where she works as a freelance event curator for various institutions and authors’ initiatives and has been project manager at the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin since 2002. She is the co-editor of the book series VERSschmuggel (Verlag Das Wunderhorn) and the Franco-German art and literary journal La mer gelée. She translates poetry. Her most recent publications are Christian Prigent, Die Seele (together with Christian Filips); roughbooks, 2015 and Thomas Brasch, Belles sont les rimes les rimes de mentent (together with Bernard Banoun); hochroth paris 2015. Since 2016 she has been on the executive board of the Netzwerk freie Literaturszene Berlin (NFLB) e.V.