Literary programme

Kaminsky, who began writing while still at school, has written his poetry in English since 1994. His first collection of poems, Musica Humana, was published in 2002. He gained international recognition with Dancing in Odessa (2004; German: Tanzen in Odessa, 2017), which has been translated into more than twenty languages. It is a book of memories of the city of his childhood and the people who lived there, as well as a reflection on memory itself, exploring personal, family and cultural history with references to Joseph Brodsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Isaac Babel, Paul Celan and others.

In his book-length narrative poem Deaf Republic (2019; German: Republik der Taubheit, 2022), written over the course of almost ten years, Kaminsky writes about war and violence, but also about solidarity. After soldiers shoot and kill a deaf boy, the inhabitants of Vasenka, itself a theatre of war, come together and resist by pretending to be deaf. On the walls of the soldiers’ barracks, they write in chalk: “No one hears you.”

Moderation: Maya Dimerli