To mark the 10th anniversary of Heidelberg as a City of Literature, Poetry on the Move was introduced to the international network of UNESCO Cities of Literature for the first time.
Colleagues from a total of 18 cities responded to a call from Heidelberg and sent in one or two poems by contemporary poets from their city. There were no thematic guidelines, only a maximum number of characters. A reference to “being on the road” was a possible point of reference. Heidelberg then commissioned renowned translators to translate the short poems from the original language into German. The original texts and translations are available at postcards.
In the period from 1 September to 31 December 2024, there are posters with the poems on many buses and trains operated by Rhein-Neckar-Verkehrsbetriebe in the Heidelberg city area.
With contributions from the UNESCO Cities of Literature:
Angoulême, Bremen, Dunedin, Durban, Edinburgh, Krakow, Leeuwarden, Manchester, Melbourne, Norwich, Nottingham, Prague, Québec, Reykjavík, Slemani, Tartu, Tukums, Vilnius
With poetry by:
Nora Atalla, Jānis Baltvilks, Sujata Bhatt, Petr Borkovec, María Elísabet Bragadóttir Marius Burokas, Ken Cockburn, Sana-Bella Ebrahim, Deborah Ewing, Ramona Herdman, Arjan Hut, Jurgita Jasponytė, Ryszard Krynicki, Ray Liversidge, Maarja Pärtna, Laurine Rousselet, Bel Schenk, Iveta Šimkus, Mathieu Simoneau, Talat Tahir, Laura Taylor, Annie Villiers, Georgina Wilding.
Here you can find Biographical information on the participating poets.
With translations into German by:
Gudrun Beckmann, Dagmar Brenneisen, Jón Thor Gíslason, Anna Hermann, Barbara Imgrund, Abdullah Încekan, Regina Keil-Sagawe, Maximilian Murmann, Kathrin Razum, Christa Rothmeier, Wolfgang Schiffer, Ilka Schlüchtermann, Renate Schmidgall, Claudia Sinnig.
