Malakoff Kowalski and Alhierd Bacharevič
Opening of the 1st international literature festival graal-müritz
Malakoff Kowalski at the piano
Malakoff Kowalski will perform pieces from his piano trilogy from 2018 to 2022 at the opening of the graal-müritz international literature festival. Malakoff Kowalski was born in the USA to an Iranian family and later grew up in Hamburg, where he found his style by reducing the instruments to the piano and the form to the bare essentials, but despite the simplicity of his compositions, a multi-layered musical world comes to life here. The FAZ describes the albums My First Piano, Onomatopoetika and Piano Aphorisms as “decelerated, intimate, with gravity and depth, somewhere in the no man’s land between classical-romantic or even older tradition and the free inspiration of the improviser.” He recorded his most recent album Songs With Words in 2025 with pianists Johanna Summer, Igor Levit and Chilly Gonzales.
Welcome
Anja Kerl, Head of the Department of Finance and Social Affairs of the District of Rostock
Dr. Benita Chelvier, Mayor of Graal-Müritz
Dörthe Hausmann, Managing Director of Tourismus- und Kur GmbH Graal-Müritz
Ulrich Schreiber, Festival Director
Opening speech by Alhierd Bacharevič
People, fairy tales and utopias: How literature admonishes, when it is worthwhile and what it teaches
He received the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding in 2025 for his novel Europas Hunde, which was banned in Belarus. Bacharevič is a co-founder of PEN Berlin. In the jury’s statement, it said: “Alhierd Bacharevič succeeds in creating a furious literary vision of the future with his novel ‘Europe’s Dogs’, which is bursting at the narrative seams. …..A cranky idler appears as the inventor of a utopian language, a fearless boy goes to help a spy and, like Nils Holgersson, finds refuge under the wings of a grey goose, the healing powers of a dried-up mother are in demand throughout the dictatorial hyper-state. You couldn’t tell a more passionate story about Europe and its abysses.” The author, essayist, translator and former punk musician lives in exile in Germany.
