Kandé, Sylvie

Sylvie Kandé (c) Desjeux Catherine & Bernard Desjeux

Named one of the one hundred most important contemporary poetic voices by the director of Le Louvre Museum, Sylvie Kandé is the author of three collections of poetry published by Gallimard.  “Lagon, lagunes“ (2000) was postfaced by Edouard Glissant. “La quête infinie de l’autre rive“ (Eng.: The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore, 2011), short-listed for the Prix Mahogany and the Prix des Découvreurs, received the 2017 Prix Lucienne Gracia-Vincent under the auspices of Fondation Saint-John Perse. It was published in English by Wesleyan U. Press (2022). “Gestuaire“ (2016) is also forthcoming in English. As an historian, Kandé contributed notably an essay on the Krio/Creoles of Sierra Leone to the 10th volume of the UNESCO “General History of Africa“ and another one on the French dimension of the Black Atlantic to the “Routledge Handbook of French History“. She was granted the 2022 Western Society for French History Tyler Stovall Mission Prize. In 2024, she received a Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities from the State University of New York.

Festival Content

WELTKLANG

Night of Poetry

Betonhalle | 15/10 € Anthology included Tickets

This summer, we are celebrating a night of poetry for the 25th time in Berlin. According to the annals of the capital’s media, the first edition on Potsdamer Platz in 2000 coincided with the sudden onset of a summer cold spell. It was way too dark to read into the anthology, and yet an enthusiastic audience held out until two in the morning.

Opposed to that night’s mythological inception at the turn of the millennium, there are not only warm rooms at Weltklang, but also reading lamps. Since 2023, German and English translations of all the poems read have been published in an anthology that is traditionally limited to people in attendance.

The eight poets from different parts of the world who are taking the stage this evening will read and perform in their original languages, showcasing the intensities that poetry can generate not only in silent reading but also in the spoken word, in the concentration of a poetic voice.

Brassinga, Anneke • Chingonyi, Kayo • CAConrad • Ekhtesari, Fatemeh • Hwang, Yuwon • Kandé, Sylvie • Kiyanovska, Marianna • Vlada, Miruna

WRITING HISTORIES

For history is a wicked stepmother when memory is orphaned

Kuppelhalle | 9/7 € Tickets

How does history become embedded in poetry? And how do poets engage with traces of collective or individual memories while addressing the traumas of entire societies that span across generations? What happens with historical sources in poetic work and how does poetry’s power of imagination change the experience of history? Writing Histories introduces four poets who dive deep into history within their texts and explore its diverse impacts on the present.

Kandé, Sylvie • Kiyanovska, Marianna • Uribe, Sara • Vlada, Miruna