33. Open Mike – Debütlesungen

In the organizer's words:

Every year, former finalists read from their debut books on the eve of the competition and talk about their journey from the Open Mike stage to their first book. This year: Samuel Kramer and Fiona Sironic.

Samuel Kramer (born 1996 in Gießen) was awarded the 21st Open Mike Poetry Prize in 2021. In his debut collection endlich regen (roughbooks 2025), we enter a world that is strikingly similar to our own in its existential threat. The snow is meters high and "threatened CEOs fire off caustic defense secretions". A "paywall white" expands the space and theories are circulating that set the hedgehogs on fire in the garden. Samuel Kramer writes political poems in a late-period consciousness. They are broadcast on the "penultimate frequency", spoken with a tongue coated in dust, into a world that does not want to hear the truth. "The lie and 16 / other friends like it."

Fiona Sironic (born 1995 in Neuss) won an award at Open Mike 2019 for an excerpt from her text Das ist der Sommer, in dem das Haus einstürzt . Am Samstag gehen die Mädchen in den Wald und jagen Sachen in die Luft (Ecco 2025) is now her debut novel, which has been shortlisted for the German Book Prize. In it, Sironic atmospherically describes a not-too-distant future in which late capitalism has reached a dystopian low point in overheated summers, extreme forest fires and mass animal extinction. The protagonist Era lives in a hut in the forest with her mother, who is researching the Early Internet, because "things won't be good in the city for much longer". Water is strictly rationed and there are hardly any fresh vegetables left. Era falls in love with Maja, who blows up the data carriers of her momfluencer mothers in order to lead a self-determined offline life. Era, on the other hand, keeps a record, collects her grandfather's stuffed birds, meticulously documents extinct animal species and her history with Maja: "To create a document, should it ever be necessary. A document of our shared history, which was then no longer a history."

In reading & conversation Samuel Kramer & Fiona Sironic
Moderated by Tatjana Vogel

The 33rd Open Mike is an event organized by the Haus für Poesie in cooperation with silent green and is funded in 2025 by the German Literature Fund and the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion. With the kind support of Buchbox and Leuchtturm 1917. Presented by taz, Das Wetter, Literaturport and Merkur.