photo © Dirk Skiba

Ariane von Graffenried [Switzerland]

Ariane von Graffenried was born in 1978 in Bern. She graduated from the University of Berne with a PhD in theatre studies. Graffenried is the author of stories, literary songs, poetry, spoken word texts, plays, essays and also writes for newspapers and academia. Ariane von Graffenried is a member of the award-winning writers’ collective Bern ist überall (tr: Bern is everywhere) and a curator of the International Poetry Festival Basel. Since 2005, she has performed as a spoken word artist with musician and sound artist Robert Aeberhard as the duo Fitzgerald & Rimini. In 2017 her book Babylon Park was published. Her most recent work is 50 Hertz, a CD with a collection of poems. She has received several literary prizes for her texts. In her spoken texts, Ariane von Graffenried switches playfully from Swiss dialects to High German, from French to English. She crosses language borders and geographical dividing lines and mixes aesthetics with social criticism, the fantastic with the factual, the laughable with the questionable. For many years she’s been working at the interface between literature, music and performance. In close collaboration with the musician Robert Aeberhard (Fitzgerald & Rimini), some of her texts became spoken songs. A selection of her texts published in Babylon Park have been presented at international festivals, translated by Anne Posten and performed by «Fitzgerald & Rimini». In 2022, she received the Literature Prize from the city and canton of Bern.