Two Free Literary Events in Berlin

Having moaned and groaned about funding for literary events earlier this week, I wanted to tell you about a couple of Berlin things happening for free, and presumably without funding, that look pretty exciting to me.

The first is Fiction Canteen's Open Mike event this coming Wednesday, 21 January, in the old bus garage canteen in Wedding, Uferstraße 8-11 (don't give up looking; it's tucked around the back to the right of the piano workshop). Transfiction say:

Bring a text – poetry, prose, or an excerpt from your novel in progress. Translations into English welcome. The rules, as usual: turn up at 8pm, take a number, read for 5 minutes, then afterwards mingle and have a drink! Event is in English.

And the second event is run by people I don't actually know (which is odd, don't you think?). They say:

books without covers is a new reading series in Berlin for German and English literature.

We shift the focus from cover to content, concentrating on texts rather than on biographies, bibliographies and blurbs. Avoiding to judge a book by its cover,  actors will be reading the texts.

The first reading will be on the 4th of February 2015.

At Galerie Anna25, Schönleinstraße 25. Readers: Dorothee Höhn, Mandy Neukirchner and Marlene Krursel // Texts by Adrian Kasnitz, Peter Lünenschloß, Rebecca Drutschmann, Silvia Groeger, Valentin Moritz and Verena Keller. 

I strongly suspect this particular episode will be all German literature, but don't let that put you off.

Both of which go to show that the good people of Berlin are doing marvellous, unusual things all the time without getting paid for it, and hooray for them. Or maybe they're paying the actors. I hope they are. I hope they're paying the actors a really good fee and the whole thing's being funded by a philanthropist who made her fortune by inventing the cereal bar or something equally innocuous.