27^th Leukerbad International Literary Festival

Authors

Rolf Hermann

Switzerland

Valais-born Rolf Hermann is a freelance writer living in Biel. He writes Spoken Word texts, prose, poems, and radio and theater plays, often in dialect. His texts have been translated into Arabic, English, French, Lithuanian, Polish, Spanish, and Hungarian. Along with numerous solo readings (with and without music), he currently appears with the musician Nadja Stoller and together with Matto Kämpf as the duo Kazzino Kolibri.

In 2021, Rolf Hermann’s new volume of poetry In der Nahaufnahme verwildern wir (In Close-Up We Run to Seed) appeared. Taking as a point of departure four cycles of poems that Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in French at the end of his life in the Château Muzot in Valais, Rolf Hermann shines a light with his poems into our living environment. Sensuous and tender, conscious of form and with an unmistakable tone: he ranges through several landscapes simultaneously, that of his memories, that of childhood and youth, that of his homeland with its deep valleys and steep cliffs, and that of his writing model, Rilke, who still has an atmospheric presence in the Rhone valley. A chance encounter with an animal inspires the hope for a fusion of humans and nature, a glowing screen, a window that pops up—and the lines become an entry point, an interface between virtuality and direct experience. A walk through a long-vanished fruit garden, in which even the particles of air have become sluggish due to their ancient weight.

In der Nahaufnahme verwildern wir. Gedichte. Der gesunde Menschenversand 2021
Eine Kuh namens Manhattan. edition spoken script 33. Der gesunde Menschenversand 2019
Flüchtiges Zuhause. Erzählungen. Rotpunktverlag 2018

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