February has been a busy month for many Temporary Literaturhaus participants. Here in Wellington the Fringe Festival is in full swing. If, like me, you didn’t catch Lorenzo Bühne at his first Fringe gig, you can head down to Happy on 29th Feb where he will be performing tracks from his brand-new album Wild Iron: New Zealand Poetry Adapted to Song. I had an excellent reason for not seeing the first show – I was listening to “edgy words” with four poets including Aleksandra Lane, whose first book in English (yes, she has two in Serbian already!) Birds of Clay had been launched a few days earlier. I can highly recommend Aleks’s poetry – and also her family’s Serbian home cooking and the gypsy music performed by her friends. This week Tina Makereti has also been having some multilingual adventures – read an interview here about the German translation of her work. Elizabeth Knox, who wrote a new Grim/m fairytale for our Lithaus launch, will be among the NZ writers travelling to Leipzig for the book fair next month, but in the next couple of weeks she’ll be appearing at literary festivals in Beijing and Shanghai. Hinemoana Baker is also on the road, with a poetry reading in New York next week. Right now I am eying the first (and currently only) bound proof of next month’s “Sport” with contributions from NZ and German writers (and their translators) including various Temporary Literaturhaus participants. The volume will be launched at Writers and Readers Week, which is drawing ever closer. I’m looking forward to the session with Jenny Erpenbeck (read an extract from Visitation here), discussions about the art of translation and a poetry masterclass with Bill Manhire – the names of the three chosen poets have been announced…
PS And the NZ International Arts Festival kicks off tonight!
