Veronika Dianišková (born 1986) is a Slovakian poet who has published four volumes of poetry, the most recent of which Zmena skupenstva (roughly: Aggregate Change) was published in 2023. Dianišková worked for a long time in the social sector, particularly in institutions for unhoused people. Published in 2017, her third poetry collection Správy z nedomovov (Posts from No-Homes) directly resulted from her experiences and interactions with people in these circumstances. She writes: “These poems are about people who have nowhere to go or who live on the streets and generally don’t know what ‘home’ means.” The collection has been praised for its genre-defying boldness and has been likened to social reportage as it takes on a somewhat documentary character (many of the poems are “self-portraits” written in the first-person singular).

Poet Fran Lock (born 1982) is a British poet who has published 13 volumes of poetry to date, most recently are Hyena! (Poetry Bus Press 2023) and ‘a disgusting lie’: further adventures through the neoliberal hell-mouth (Pamenar Press 2023). In her texts and essays, Lock repeatedly addresses the topic of class. And in 2021, she published the anthology The Cry of the Poor – An anthology of radical writing about poverty. She particularly opposes the appropriation of the term “working class” by the so-called elites, calling it “cynical copy-paste poverty porn.” In her poem “On Ventriloquism,” she subversively and humorously confronts this sort of patronizing appropriation: “And you say / you know me, you’ve poeted me, sifted / my bitter statistics like loose-leaf tea.” Lock’s texts are in the tradition of a resistant poetics, which she states emerged from the pagan roots and untamed landscapes of her childhood.

The poems of Radmila Petrović (born 1996 in Užice, Serbia) in the collection Meine Mama weiß, was in der Städten vor sich geht (Voland & Quist 2023, translated into German by Philine Bickhardt und Denijen Pauljević) lead their readers into a rural, brutal world of punch-drunk farms, neighborly feuds, and smashed pork cracklings. “That’s what the village is like,” she writes in the text “Molehills,” “you can feel its eyes on your skin here you deal with bat wings and have an accident at the supermarket.” It’s a world ruled by men, where the birth of a daughter is perceived as a loss. To be a woman is worse than being a dog, the text states at some point, and elsewhere she writes: “girls who are born like this / don’t know the gods.” Petrović describes herself as an adolescent woman, a loner by default, who carries the curse of the forest inside her and loves “guns, excavators, and the hammer.” She belongs to the field, she writes, “where the neighbours long ago / buried a rotten egg on our side of the border.”

Zheng Xiaoqiong (born 1980 in the southwest Chinese province of Sichuan) reached overnight fame when she was awarded the Liqun Literature Award in 2007. Until then, she had been totally unknown in China’s literary scene. In 2001, she wrote her first poems when she arrived in Dongguan (in the province of Guandong) as a migrant worker and subsequently worked there at a metalware factory for six years. The experiences from this time became the material for poetry in the cycle The Book of Women Workers. Zheng Xiaoqiong relates the inhumane everyday life in factories as well as working in shipping ports, at wire cutting machines, and on assembly lines under the “static hum of ceiling lights.” This is an engaged literature that gives voice to those losing out due to globalized capitalism. Counting among her heroines are women factory workers, canteen workers, and prostitutes, and the language she finds for the lives of these people has introduced a radically new tone to contemporary Chinese poetry: “installing inside her body / a high-powered machine, it bores into time / eating through her youth and enthusiasm, and it produces / her fake fat life.”

Moderation: Christian Filips

The event will be interpreted into English and German. With the kind support of ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen

Project management: Jutta Büchter