The Berlin International Literature Festival or ilb is an annual event based in Berlin. Every September the festival presents contemporary poetry, prose, nonfiction, graphic novels and international children's and young adult literature. Renown authors present themselves next to new talents within the wide-ranging and political programme. The festival is an event of the "Internationale Peter-Weiss-Stiftung", the founder and festival direktor is Ulrich Schreiber. The 20th edition of the ilb will take place on September 9-19th, 2020.
Programme
The festival's programme is classified in its subsections Literatures of the World, Reflections, Specials, International Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Speak, Memory. The section Specials itself is subdivided into the New German Voices, the Slam Revue as well as Scritture Giovani, an international competition for young authors. Every year a Graphic Novel Day during the festival is organised. Since 2002, internationally renowned guest authors of the ilb have visited Berlin prisons, free of charge, for an afternoon or evening during the festival where they read from their books and discuss them with prisoners. Since 2005 there have been annual cooperations with the science year, an initiative by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Since 2019 the ilb cooperates with the Cluster of Excellence "Temporal Communities. Doing Literature in a Global Perspective" at FU Berlin. At all events of the ilb, texts are presented by the authors in their mother tongue, followed by the reading of the German translation which is done by actors. With presenters and translators available, a discussion between presenter, author and even the audience is made possible. Every year the ilb is opened in a celebratory event. Opening Speakers have been Petina Gappah, Eva Menasse, Elif Shafak, Cesar Aira, Javier Marias, Pankaj Mishra, Taiye Selasi, Liao Yiwu, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Juan Goytisolo, Arundhati Roy, Nancy Huston, David Grossman, Édouard Glissant, Carlos Fuentes, Antjie Krog, Shashi Tharoor, Dževad Karahasan, Charles Simic.
Catalogue: The annually-published festival catalogue contains photos, biographies and selected bibliographies of all participating writers.
The Berlin Anthology: All authors who participated in the program section 'Literatures of the World' come together and select 99 poems, that will be published in their original language and a German translation.
Scritture Giovani: Each year, the ilb publishes five short stories which have been exclusively written for the ilb Scritture Giovani contest according to a specific theme in the languages of the five participating countries.
