Clear the stage for literature

A writer, a book, a table – that’s all you need for a reading? Yeah, right. The ‘LesArt’ Literature Festival has been showing for ten years how to put literature on the stage properly.

Every November outstanding authors, poets and performers come for one week to Dortmund. The programme is organized by the Literature Association, aided by the Cultural Office and the City and Regional Libraries. It offers a mix of familiar, new and surprising elements. LesArt has already put on readings in a changing cubicle, literature-rap concerts and a poetry jam.

Kindergarten children regularly stage a children’s book for LesArt.
Photo: Klauspeter Sachau

Heroes from here

An entertaining evening of local culture with the title “Heroes from here” reveals the literary riches of the Dortmund scene. The festival’s big public closing event will be the setting for the award of the Lesart Prize for Young Literature. Another important event is the KindergartenBookTheatreFestival: Dortmund kindergartens put on their own performances of children’s books in the Fletch Bizzel Theatre.

In 2008 Jürgen von der Lippe read from his book "Noch viel mehr von Sie und Er" (“Even more about She and He”) at the closing event.
Photo: Michael Printz

Teaming up with the Chamisso Prize

Since the Chamisso Days by the Ruhr 2007, winners of the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize have regularly been guests at LesArt. The Adelbert von Chamisso Prize of the Robert Bosch Foundation is for authors with a non-German mother tongue who write in German.

The author Zehra Çirak worked for five months with a class from Dortmund’s Gertrud Bäumer High School in a school writing workshop. She will present the results during the 2010 Festival.