Brave New Voices

Sivan Ben Yshai, born in Tel Aviv in 1978, is an Israeli playwright and theater director. She has lived in Berlin since 2012. Her plays have been performed at the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, Nationaltheater Mannheim, Münchner Kammerspiele and in Helsinki, Luxembourg, Tel Aviv and New York City. In 2019, Sivan Ben Yishai was in-house playwright at the Nationaltheater Mannheim. In 2022, she was awarded the Mülheim Playwriting Prize for Wounds Are Forever (Self-Portrait as a National Poet) and was selected as Playwright of the Year 2022 by Theater heute. In 2022 and 2023, her plays were invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen. Her plays have been published both in German and in the original (English) by Suhrkamp Theaterverlag since 2017. In 2023 she was awarded the Berlin Theater Prize. According to the jury, the playwright “appeared in the firmament of German-language theater like a comet”; this was the first time the prize was awarded to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to German-language theater without writing in German. In 2024, she won the Mülheim Drama Prize for the second time. 

31 August – Topic: Climate justice

Luisa Neubauer is a climate activist, author and co-organiser of Fridays for the Future, and one of the most prominent figures in the German climate movement. In 2021, she and others won the landmark Constitutional Court ruling 'Neubauer vs. Germany' against the German government in the fight for political action on climate change. For five years, Luisa and the movement brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets. In October 2023, she was awarded the Predigtpreis, and at the end of 2023, she spoke at the Vatican. She has met with President Macron, Angela Merkel and Barack Obama and published four bestselling books on the climate crisis; her fifth book, Was wäre, wenn wir mutig sind, was published in January 2025.

14 September – Topic: Economic power and political influence

Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish novelist, a political thinker, and a public speaker whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, La Stampa, New Statesman and Der Spiegel, among several international media outlets. She won the Edinburgh International Book Festival First Book award for her novel Women Who Blow On Knots and the Ambassador Of New Europe Award for her book Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy. She is the author of the internationally acclaimed book How to Lose a Country. Together: A Manifesto Against the Heartless World, her latest book has been published in several languages. Ece Temelkuran lived in Beirut, Tunis, and Paris, to write her novels. She was a visiting fellow at Saint Anthony's College Oxford to write Deep Mountain: Across The Armenian Turkish Divide. For the last six years, she has lived in Zagreb. She was a fellow at Robert Bosch foundation. Her novel The Time of Mute Swans has been published in several languages and has been turned into play in Thalia Theater in Hamburg, and her novel Women Who Blow On Knots was adapted by Arcola Theatre in London. She is on the advisory board of Progressive International and Democracy Next. She received the El Mundo Award for her body of work. She's currently based in Berlin.