Moderators

MUSTAFA AL-SLAIMAN, was born in Jordan in 1960 and has lived in Germany since 1980. He studied applied linguistics and cultural studies. He has worked as lecturer in conference interpreting and Arab language and literature and as an interpreter for the German Foreign Office. He has been the coordinator of literary translation from German into Arabic for Kalima Abu Dhabi for almost eight years. He has translated several books from German into Arabic and Arabic into German and is the editor of numerous works with Kalima Publishers. He lives and works in Berlin.

THORSTEN DÖNGES studied German language and literature and history in Bamberg. Since 2000, he has worked at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin where he coordinates the program in contemporary German-language literature. He first discovered and fell in love with the Leukerbad International Literary Festival as a moderator in 2006.

ETRIT HASLER was born in 1977 in St. Gallen and is one of the pioneers of Swiss Slam Poetry. Since his first slam in 2000, he has taken part in hundreds of slams in Germany, Austria, Lichtenstein, the Netherlands, Serbia, Egypt, and not least in the United States, the motherland of poetry slams, lately more often as moderator. He is also active as a journalist and translator of English poetry and sits on the St. Gallen city and canton councils.

JENNIFER KHAKSHOURI Is an editor and moderator with SRF2 Cultural Radio. She also moderates panels on a wide array of topics as well as readings for the literature houses of Basel and Zürich. She previously worked for a number of newspapers and magazines in various departments and for theaters in Zürich and St. Gallen.

CHRISTINE LÖTSCHER pursues scholarly research in nonsense and materiality at the University of Zürich (in the Institute for Social Anthropology and Empirical Cultural Studies/Popular Cultures). She also works as a freelance literary and film critic and is on the team of critics for Swiss television’s Literaturclub broadcast. In 2014 her study of fantasy writing, DAS ZAUBERBUCH ALS DENKFIGUR, was published by Chronos Publishers.

CAMILLE LUSCHER attended the University of Lausanne and holds a Masters Degree in Contemporary Arts Practice in Literature and Translation from the Hochschule der Künste in Bern. She has worked at the Centre de Traduction Littéraire since 2013 and is a freelance translator. She has translated works by Arno Camenisch and Max Frisch, among others. She has been a member of the ‘Bieler Gespräch’ planning committee since 2013. Since 2014 she has served on the board of the Swiss authors’ guild.

DANIEL PUNTAS BERNET, Was born in 1965. After a commercial apprenticeship he worked in Belp for ten years in a notary’s office in finance and marketing. He traveled throughout the continent of South America for two years before working towards a degree in German and Spanish literatures. He wrote his first article at the age of 37. As a freelance writer he has contributed reportage to the NZZ, Geo, and Cicero. From 2004 to 2011, he worked as an editor for the NZZ am Sonntag in the background and business sections. His passion for telling stories and, even more, for being told stories led him to found the Reportagen website in 2011, of which he still is the publisher.
www.reportagen.com

DRAGICA RAJČIĆ see “Authors”.

ROBERT RENK is a bookseller and active proponent of literature in Innsbruck. He successfully broke off his studies in mathematics and German language and literature. He has founded and directed several cultural centers and festivals in Austria. His most recent publication is STILISTISCHE INSTANZEN. ZU KARL-MARKUS GAUSS UND ALOIS HOTSCHNIG in Text + Kritik’s special Austrian issue.

RETO SORG Teaches contemporary German literature at the University of Lausanne, is a parner of Sorg Consulting and directs the Robert Walser Zentrum in Berlin. His areas of speciality are Literary Modernity, Intermedia, Contemporary literature and Swiss literature.

STEFAN ZWEIFELIs a freelance journalist in Zürich. He has translated works by Rousseau and Cendrars. He led the SRF Literaturclub until 2014. With Juri Steiner he organized ‘SOS Dada’ in the Swiss Salon at the Biennale in Venice and ‘Dada Universal’ in the Zürich Landesmuseum. His most recent publication with co-author Michael Pfister is SHADES OF SADE (Matthes & Seitz 2015).

HOME PAGE
NEWSLETTER
DEUTSCH | FRANÇAIS

LITERARY WALK
22nd Leukerbad International Literary Festival
30 June to 2 July 2017