Ben Lerner

(c) Catherine Barnett

Ben Lerner was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979 and is one of the world’s best-known and most important poets. He has written three collections of poems, “The Lichtenberg Figures” (2004), “Angle of Yaw” (2006) and “Mean Free Path” (2010). The book “No Art”, published in 2016, collected all three together. Lerner is also the author of three novels, “Leaving the Atocha Station” (Coffee House Press, 2011), “10:04” (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2014), and “The Topeka School” (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2019).

Publications (selection):
No Art. Granta Books, 2016.
Mean Free Path. Copper Canyon Press, 2010.
Angle of Yaw. Copper Canyon Press, 2006.
The Lichtenberg figures. Copper Canyon Press, 2004.
Angle of Yaw. Copper Canyon Press, 2006.

Awards:
2020: Finalist, The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
2019: Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award
2019: Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
2015–2020: MacArthur Foundation Fellowship
2013: Guggenheim Fellowship
2006: Finalist des National Book Award for Angle of Yaw
2003–2004: Fulbright Fellowship
2003: Hayden Carruth Award

Festival Content

WELTKLANG – Night of Poetry

Weltklang – Night of Poetry is the opening in many voices of the poesiefestival berlin – this year in video format online. Poets from all parts of the world read, sing and perform in their seven native languages. They show the wealth of contemporary poetry, the diversity of its content, the wide range of its approaches and styles. The German translations will be faded in; many of the poems have been translated into German for the first time for Weltklang.

Ichiko Aoba • Marieke Lucas Rijneveld • Marko Tomaš • Chus Pato • Peter Waterhouse • Judith Zander • Ben Lerner • Hannah Lowe • Valzhyna Mort

Poetry Talk with Ben Lerner

No Art

Under the title “No Art”, the collected poetry of Ben Lerner has just been published bilingually by Suhrkamp, an interest absolutely unusual in this scope for a contemporary US poet of his generation. Steffen Popp talked about the three volumes of Lerner’s poetry that No Art collects – “The Lichtenberg Figures”, “Angle of Yaw” and “Mean Free Path” – at the book launch at Haus für Poesie in Berlin, along with Monika Rinck, who co-translated “Mean Free Path”.

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Ben Lerner