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

Note: Programme change

Ece Temelkuran unfortunately had to cancel her participation in the Brave New Voices event on 14 September as the publication of her new book was brought forward at short notice.

We are pleased to welcome Ilija Trojanow as a new guest instead. With his current work Das Buch der Macht, he reflects on power, domination and their dangers, thereby bringing new perspectives to the discussion on economic power and political influence.

 Ilija Trojanow, born in 1965 in Sofia, Bulgaria, grew up in Germany and Nairobi. He studied law and ethnology in Munich from 1984 to 1989. There he founded Kyrill & Method Verlag and Marino Verlag. In 1998 Trojanow moved to Mumbai, in 2003 to Cape Town, today he lives in Vienna when he is not travelling. His novels such as Der Weltensammler, Macht und Widerstand and Tausend und ein Morgen as well as his travelogues are celebrated bestsellers and have been awarded numerous prizes.