The Dramatists Festival 2024 kicked off with eleven authors giving readings in intimate settings. Hosts invited their family, friends and acquaintances into their private living rooms, children's rooms, conservatories or kitchens and offered authors a cosy stage. The festival thus took up the tradition of the Literary Salon. The audience met the artists without barriers and gained an insight into contemporary text work.
This was also the case in Pöllau on Tuesday, 21 May. Miriam Unterthiner, a young author from South Tyrol, is currently studying Language Arts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and Scenic Writing at Drama Forum. She has already received several nominations and prizes and her play ‘Va†erzunge’ will premiere in May 2025 at the Tiroler Landestheater. She presented the play, which describes the life of a woman in a remote mountain village alongside her withdrawn widowed father, in the Dreier family's living room. Using litany-like repetitive language and formulaic sentences in particular, the author succeeds in evoking the cramped conditions in the village and in the family in which Maria struggles for her existence.
Miriam Unterthiner
Also in a private house in Pöllau, Yannic Han Biao Federer turned his audience into fellow actors. With distributed roles, the author and all those present read from the play ‘Asiawochen. Or: The Spirit of Bandung’, which thematises the turmoil of a German-Indonesian family caught between the political burdens of the two countries. The play was awarded the Hans Gratzer Scholarship 2023/24, presented in an excerpt at Schauspielhaus Wien in February 2024 and as a short radio play at Soundart - Kunst zum Hören on Ö1.
Yannic Han Biao Federer lives and works as a freelance author in Cologne. He writes novels and short stories, essays and reviews for Deutschlandfunk, WDR and SWR, among others. His debut novel ‘Und alles wie aus Pappmaché’ was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2019, followed by his second novel ‘Tao’ in March 2022. He is a member of PEN Berlin and the Young Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts in North Rhine-Westphalia.
yannichanbiaofederer.de
