Speaking on the radio means speaking in isolation. The possible listeners remain hidden, their speech remains unheard. Genuine, direct contact in response to a search call ('suchruf') must be avoided - and so the space opens up to fantasize a listener: as an ideal counterpart, as a symmetrical counter-contour to one's own self, which could be caught in a search sound yet to be found. The deafness caused by the radio, however, sends the groping, questioning speech into a swirl: the speech and radio waves only hit themselves, break back into themselves.
The award winner
Anja Utler, born in 1973 in Schwandorf, Upper Palatinate, studied Slavic Studies, English Studies, and Speech Education in Regensburg, Norwich, and St. Petersburg. In 2003, she received her doctorate in Regensburg with a thesis on Russian female poets of the modern era.
She was discovered and encouraged as a poet by Thomas Kling. Since 2001, she has been living in Vienna, was a fellow at the Stuttgart Academy Schloss Solitude in 2005/06, and held the Poetics lectureship at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in the summer of 2008.
She has published three poetry collections: "Aufsagen" (1999), "Münden – entzüngeln" (2004), "Brinnen" (2006; also available as an audiobook). Her lecture "Plötzlicher Mohn" was published in the series 'Münchener Reden zur Poesie' in 2007. Her poem "suchrufen, taub," produced in 5.1 surround sound format for the ORF Kunstradio, is her first radio work.
Additional awards include the Leonce-und-Lena Prize for Poetry (2003), the Promotional Award for the Horst Bienek Prize for Poetry (2005), and the Promotional Award of the German Schiller Foundation of 1859 (2006).
