Poetry of the marginalised: 100 years of Paul Celan

Igor Pomerantsev is a poet, critic, playwright and broadcaster. He worked for the BBC and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in London, Munich, and Prague as editor and presenter. He is the author of radio plays and several books of prose, poetry and essays, including Radio ‘C’. The Book of Radio Stories (2002). He is one of the founding members of the Meridian Czernowitz International Poetry Festival, and Paul Celan Literature Centre in Chernivtsi.

Annja Neumann is Affiliated Lecturer in German at the University of Cambridge and Isaac Newton Research Fellow in Digital Humanities at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cambridge. She teaches modern German literature, visual culture and medical humanities at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics and the Faculty of Medicine at Cambridge. Her current research focuses on embodiment, the staging of space and the process of theatricalisation, particularly in theatres of medicine and in the arts. In 2012 she completed her PhD in German literature at Queen Mary University of London with a thesis exploring the notion of historicity in the late poetry of Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan. She is author of Durchkreuzte Zeit. Zur ästhetischen Temporalität der späten Gedichte von Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan (‘Aesthetic temporality in the late poetry of Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan’, 2013).

Gaëlle Fisher is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, Germany. She earned her PhD from University College London in 2015 with a thesis on the experiences of German-speakers from the Bukovina after the Second World War. She is author of Resettlers and Survivors: Bukovina and the Politics of Belonging in West Germany and Israel, 1945–1989 (2020).

Iryna Vikyrchak is a Ukrainian cultural manager, literature promoter and author. She has worked as executive and programme director for several literary organizations and festivals and as the Head of the Creative Europe Program in Ukraine. She is the author of three books of poetry. Currently based in Wroclaw, Poland, where she is working for the Wroclaw House of Literature and the Noble Laureate in Literature Olga Tokarczuk. Iryna is developing her doctoral thesis on the work of Rose Ausländer at the moment as well.

Uilleam Blacker is Associate Professor in Comparative Russian and East European Culture at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His research focuses on Ukrainian, Polish and Russian culture and cultural memory. He is author of Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe: The Ghosts of Others (2019).