Poets and Speakers

Gerhard Falkner

Gerhard Falkner
Foto: Goethe-Institut / Andrea Fernandes
Gerhard Falkner , born in 1951 in Schwabach, is uncontestably one of the most important German contemporary poets. He is also a renowned novelist, dramatist, essayist, and translator. He lives in Berlin and Nuremberg.

The publication of his first volume of poetry, so beginnen am körper die tage (so begin the days along your body) received enormous critical acclaim. The volume was followed by der atem unter der erde (the breath beneath the ground) 1984 and wemut in 1989.

Using essential images, in so beginnen am körper die tage Gerhard Falkner left behind the poetic common sense of the early 1980s that rejected anything but formal experiments and ‘everyday poetry’. He combined formal discipline with an opulent and direct sense of the present, thus preparing the ground, as one of the first of his generation, for poetry alive with richness and sensuality as well as melancholy and pain, as it then began to gain acceptance from the mid-1980s. Falkner’s poems also dealt with the estrangement of the poet, the disappearance of the writer in the background noise of his text and of history.

Falkner has received numerous awards and scholarships. A grant awarded by the ‘Literarisches Colloqium’ led to the publication of Berlin -Eisenherzbriefe (Berlin - Iron Heart Letters) in 1986, considered to be a crucial postmodern mixed text. In 2008, Falkner received the Kranischstein Literature Prize and the August Graf von Platen Prize for his novella “Bruno”. In 2010, he was awarded the Prize of the City of Nuremberg. In 2013 he received the prestigious, newly founded “Tarabya Fellowship” in Istanbul.

Poems

IGNATIA 1 /
اگنیشیا۔۔۔


Ignatia 9 /
इग्नेशिया ९


Ignatia 13 /
इग्नेशिया १३