Birds in the Skies, Mycelium Under the Ground

Ali Abdollahi, born in Iran, lives in Berlin as a poet, translator and literary critic. In Iran, he has published seven poetry collections, more than 90 translations, as well as various anthologies of modern German-language poetry and prose, which he translated and edited, with several reprints. In Germany, he has published five translated poetry collections so far, and his own poetry collection "Wetterumschlag" (Persian-German), 2021 (Secession Verlag Berlin), has received many awards, including the Adalbert von Chamisso Publication Prize 2021 and the Horst Bingel Literature Prize 2022.

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Aya Sammani is a Sudanese journalist, creative director, and social activist based in Berlin. Specializing in storytelling and visual narration, her work covers displacement, conflict reporting, and using analytical journalism to archive and notate important societal events. She has recently presented her book “Our collective fragail memory”, which is a collection of photo and text essays by Sudanese artists. Aya developed this project as a scholar of the Martin Roth Initiative.

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Kholoud Bidak is an African, curator, editor,  intersectional educator, writer, and Psychological Neurodivergent counselor, among many other things. They have a career of over 23 years and they have been working both in the global south & the global north. They have been curating with goethe institut Juhansberg, Goethe institute Cape Town and goethe institute in Nairobi, Cairo & Alexandria. Their focus is on coming back to a connection with ancestral healing using literature and other forms of arts. They use somatic approaches in their work, singing & storytelling.

Ma Thida is a Burmese writer, human rights activist, surgeon and former political prisoner. In Myanmar, she is best known as a leading intellectual who addresses the political situation in the country in her books, which was often perceived as a threat by the government. She was President of PEN Myanmar until the military coup in September 2022. She recently became a fellow of the Writers-in-Exile Programme of the PEN Centre Germany. Ma Thida studied medicine in the 1980s, became a surgeon and later worked at the Muslim Free Hospital, which provides medical care to poor people. She earned a reputation as a progressive writer at a young age. 

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