Catti Brandelius

00TAL discovered Catti Brandelius talent already in the beginning of the nineties when she and Uje Brandelius had a student band in Uppsala. One day Madeleine Grieve received a scratched tape, fell for the lyrics and invited the band to several of 90TAL’s events. Catti Brandelius was 00TAL’s cover girl in the issue POETRY to the PEOPLE, the POWER and the whole damned ESTABLISHMENT in 2001.

She is an artist and a performer; she’s been a community singing leader with indie hits at Debaser in Stockholm, a chronicler in the Swedish radio, the papers Arbetarbladet, Svenska Dagbladet and the magazine Ordfront. She was born in Gävle 1971 and is now residing in her beloved Stockholm suburb Bredäng. Catti Brandelius has studied at the University College of Arts Crafts and Design, Konstfack, and today she studies at the Royal University College of Fine Arts where she makes sculptures as a special student for Marie-Louise Ekman. She is currently having an exhibition at the Galleri Crystal Palace.

Catti Brandelius was one of the founders of the Swedish cult band Doktor Kosmos in the beginning of the nineties. This is also where her legendary alter ego the rough pop idol Miss Universum was created, famous for not letting anyone escape her sharp tongue: hey I have testosterone / hey I hate kids / hey I ate six lemons before I left home / hey I am fat and I take up one and a half seat / hey I am a killer / hey I don’t want to live anymore / hey come and help me. She was the female roll model Catti Brandelius herself was missing. Six years later Miss Universum became a solo artist and toured Sweden with her feminist cocky performances. Besides pop music she made fanzines, installations, theatre performances and art exhibitions. In 2005 her book Miss Universums samlade texter och bilder 97-05 was released. That very same year Catti Brandelius had a tour with the performance ”Profesura” where she appointed herself the title of professor.

Catti Brandelius makes loving, comical observations of contemporary life and people’s dreams. In her performances she mixes music and singing with spoken word and political agitation. At the festival we will see her as a new character and this time it is no Miss we are getting acquainted with.

Bas Böttcher
The German performance poet Bas (Bastian) Böttcher has made rap and poetry slams important elements in the German present day lyric poetry. His aesthetics can be described as a fusion of genres, the performances are illustrated by video projections and his acts both accentuate and loosen the border between rap and poetry. Bas Böttcher regards his texts as “sensuous occurrences. They occur at discotheques, libraries, stages, in literature and at festivals”. The performance on stage has a central place in his poetry making and he emphasizes tone, rhythmic and lingual dynamics as essential elements to create an atmosphere and frame of mind. We will see him in a performance accompanied by picture projections and sound art.

Monica och Karl-Axel Dominique
They were still in their teens when they met at the Royal Collage of Music in Stockholm. Since then Monica and Carl-Axel Dominique have created magic together. With a rebellious bond to music, passion, humour and eyes that sparkle they create a unique contact with their audience. They are Sweden’s foremost crossover-musicians who have refused deep-rooted conceptions of genres for decades.

Monica Dominique’s musical genius was discovered when she as a three-year old could play the piano by ear, with both hands. She’s been called a creative whirlwind with astounding musicality. Even if Monica Dominique is a musician with many pursuits, her base has always been jazz-music and she’s been inspired by artists like Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. She has performed as a pianist, an arranger and a composer and on her list of qualifications there’s everything from orchestral arrangement, to the famous signature melody of the Swedish ice-cream van. In 1994 Monica Dominique received the Evert Taube scholarship.

Carl-Axel Dominique started playing the piano when he was nine years old. He got his education at the Royal Collage of Music in Stockholm and the Juilliard School of Music in New York. He did his debut as a pianist in 1965 with Charles Ives’ Concordsonata. Since then he has introduced out of the ordinary piano music by composers such as Charles Alkan, Erik Satie, Olivier Messianen etc. Carl-Axel Dominique is one of our times best Messianen-interpreters. His technique is brilliant but he never lets it surpass the importance of the musical expression.

The couple has been participating in different contexts, everything from musicals, the Eurovision Song Contest, to the most difficult interpreted modern classical repertoire. They are somewhat of Swedish champions in playing a duet on the piano and they have started the jazz group MDQ – Monica Dominique Quintet. In August 2002 Mr And Mrs Dominique received the award Sjösalapriset.
At the festival they will perform a musical tribute to the recently departed writer Lars Forssell, in the shape of a mini show with lyrics by the writer himself.

Nicolai Dunger
Nicolai Dunger intended to become a professional soccer player, but when he was discovered singing on his balcony in Piteå, his northern hometown, he left the soccer career behind. Today he is described as the Swedish Jim Morrison and he has played with artists like The Soundtrack of Our Lives, Will Oldham, Calexico and Sufjan Stevens.

With music characterized by curiosity and the desire to experiment, Nicolai Dunger has let the singer/songwriter-tradition lead him to the Swedish tradition of folk- and troubadour-music. His musical versions of Edith Södergran’s poetry became an important source of inspiration to continue writing his own material in Swedish, and this year Nicolai Dunger released Rösten och herren, a record that has intoxicated, captivated and astonished the critics.

Dickon Edwards
A wordsmith, dysfunctional dandy, flâneur and a lyricist – that is how the gentleman Dickon Edwards presents himself on his website dickonedwards.co.uk. This is where he has been making himself famous through his journal. Edwards is a singer and songwriter in the British indie pop band Fosca who release their third album The Painted Side of the Rocket, on the Swedish label But is it art? this winter.

Fosca is music for those who spent their after school hours reading Oscar Wilde while listening to Morrissey. Behind the happy, danceable melodies hides black humour and gloomy lyrics about being an outsider, though Fosca twist it around and blow up alienation into something hopeful and glowing.

Dickon Edwards used to be a member of the bands Orlando and Spearmint. Each month you can see him behind the turntables at his London club Beautiful and damnd. Recently he participated in the anthology The Decadent Handbook and he is also featured on Friday Bridge’s recently released album Intricacy. At the festival he will perform solo and together with Martina Lowden who has written warmly about him in her debut novel.

Kerstin Ekman
A scent of polypori and pine will disperse over Elverket when Kerstin Ekman reads from her latest book, Herrarna i skogen, the praised collection of essays in which she leads the reader through winding paths in the northern forests. From a fallen pine she tells the story of the Swedish forests holds the branches out of the way and lightens the morning mist so that we can see the enchanting and the beautiful. Like a literary siren of the woods she castes spells on the felling and trips the joggers so that they finally can feel the scent of the path they are running on.

Kerstin Ekman is one of Sweden’s first female crime writers; she was 27 when she made her debut. In the seventies she made her big breakthrough with the trilogy
Kvinnorna och Staden. With her close to reality and psychologically nuanced texts she was a pioneer within the crime genre. She has written over 20 books, principally novels but also essays and poetry. She was elected a member of the Swedish Academy in 1978 but left in 1989 due to the debate following death threats posed to Salman Rushdie. She will remain a passive member for the rest of her life. She is conferred a doctor's degree at Umeå University and recently became silvicultural honorary doctor at Sweden’s University of Agriculture. Kerstin Ekman has won most of the Swedish literature awards. She has received the award Augustpriset two times and is now nominated for the third time with the motivation: “Kerstin Ekman moves as domesticated in the northern forests undergrowth as she does in medieval balladry and the present environment debate. With her combination of steep historical perspectives and strong personal presence Herrarna i skogen becomes a both cultural and existential adventure.”

Photo: Cato Lein

Friday Bridge
With poetic lyrics and a sound that builds equally upon OMD-syntesizers, Pet Shop Boys melodies and French pop from the sixties as upon Edward Elgar’s work from early twentieth century, Friday Bridge’s latest album Intricacy has been, very rightly, praised by the Swedish critics.
Friday Bridge mixes the music from the eighties with the aesthetics from the eighteenth century without feeling laboured, on the contrary, everything fall into place and create a world which is very pleasant to be in.
The lyrics are an important part of the Friday Bridge music, but Ylva Lindberg doesn’t want to complicate it, she wants the melodies and the lyrics to “create a mood where every song is its own little world inside the big one.” Despite fantastic melodies it is the lyrics that make the biggest impression, that make Friday Bridge stand out from other pop bands of today: “He said: 'Identities are now effects of difference, I understand. So I guess you’re in the space between the women you invent.' I said 'I don't need this in my life right now, a parlor game on my balcony on a rainy night.' ”

Joumana Haddad
Joumana Haddad doesn’t write poetry to escape reality; she lives her life with poetry, with all its details, love, glow, volcanoes and fires. She sees poetry as an exceptionally gendered creature, free from the dominance of the other gender. “Poetry does not wear ladies’ gowns, doesn’t shave a beard, doesn’t wear lipstick and doesn’t serve in military.”

She was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1970 where she now works as a poet, teacher, translator and chief editor of the cultural pages of the Lebanese daily An-Nahar. In 2006 she was rewarded with the Arab Press Prize. In Persian Joumana means “big pearl” suiting since she is one of the Arab word’s most talked about and celebrated poets who speaks seven languages and is impressively productive. During 2006 and 2007 she published seven book, varying from collections of poetry to anthologies. She is currently working on a PhD in translation of poetry.

So far Joumana Haddad has written five collections of poetry, among others Return to Lilith. In her poetry she describes the connection between the body and the spirit: It was sufficient for him to open his heaven’s prison a little / For the water of her sadness to leak out. / It was sufficient for him to free her sorrow’s bird / For both of them to soar high.

Gunnar Harding
Gunnar Harding describes his poetic tone with the following words from Schopenhauer:”Naturally, life considered in its whole is a tragedy, but in the details a comedy moves across the stage”. Perhaps in the spirit of this quote, he likes to read his poems accompanied by jazz bands.

Gunnar Harding was born in 1940 in the northern town of Sundsvall. He made his debut as a poet at 27 with the poetry collection Lokomotivet som frös fast. In the sixties, Gunnar Harding introduced American underground poetry in Sweden with translations of, among others, Allen Ginsberg. He has also interpreted modernist poets and avant-garde writers like Guillaume Apollinaire and Vladimir Majakovskij. His own poetic production consists of around fifteen collections. In 2004 Gunnar Harding won the Swedish Public Radio Lyric Poetry Award for his collection Det brinnande barnet. He has been referred to as “a free, undogmatic modernist, with a strong aspiration to form creative pictures in his poetry”.

Photo: Cato Lein

Bengt Emil Johnson
Bengt Emil Johnson was born in 1936 in Saxdalen, a town in the Swedish northwest. He made his debut as a lyric poet with Hyllningarna (1963) and his authorship has since then developed from “tangible” poetry to innovative nature poetry – so far he has published over twenty collections of poems. Bengt Emil Johnson is a central figure for the 1960’s boundary-breaking literary world, and he experiments with both the visual aspect of words – in his poems – and with sound – in his electronic music. His writing focuses a linguistic movement, and his latest book Tal till mig själv, has been described as an enriching excursion where he recycles earlier poetic methods to renew the genre. Bengt Emil Johnson has been rewarded with the De Nios stora pris (1983), the Gerard Bonnier Award (1998) and the Gustaf Fröding Society Award for Lyric Poetry (2006).

Photo: Cato Lein

Martina Lowden
Martina Lowden barged in to Sweden’s literary world with her debut novel Allt , immediately proclaimed a generational novel by astounded critics. Her publisher, Pietro Maglio, described it as the Novel of the Century even before it had been published, and after the novel's publication, the interest for the young debutant has been vast, or, more precisely (to paraphrase the same publisher): Martina Lowden is now, like, Daft Punk.

The debut was awarded with both the Borås’s Newspaper’s Award for Debutant Writers and the Katapult Award. Since then Martina Lowden has spoken about Gertrude Stein at Modernista’s literary lounge, discussed survival-strategies for handling the patriarchy of modern culture with Kristina Lugn and continued the web-magazine o- where she is the editor in chief. Despite not having had time for many public appearances, Martina Lowden has already developed a powerful stage presence. At the Stockholm Poetry Festival she will present a new piece accompanied by music, written especially for the festival.

Photo: Terese Andrén

John Mateer
The South African poet John Mateer was born in Roodepoort 1971, but spent some of his youth in Canada. Since 1989 he has lived in Australia. John Mateer has published six collections of poems and one book of travel prose. His poetry has been described as the poems of “a traveller, a tourist, and an immigrant”, a description that pinpoints his fascination for the interactions between language and memory, language and identity, and language and agency.

In 2001 he won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for his poetry collection Barefoot Speech. He participated in the 62nd PEN-congress, and he has performed in festivals in South Africa, Singapore and Australia. Southern Barbarians and Elsewhere are his latest poetry collections.

Livia Millhagen
Since a few years, Livia Millhagen has been an actress at Dramaten, where, among other roles, created the magnificent interpretation of Lulu in the play with the same name (2006). Her breakthrough role came in 2004 when she played the character Carola in the Swedish movie Miffo, a performance that earned her a nomination for a Guldbagge-award. Two years later she received the Gunn Wållgren-scholarship with the motivation that her talent “beyond her presence on stage and the honesty in her acting” persists in her power to create diverse characters: “She makes a divergence, without making the divergence into something that has to be projected and signalled with an raised volume.” Instead, when creating her characters, she uses sensitivity and intelligence. This year, she plays the role of Metta in Lars Norén’s recently written play Fördold, directed by Staffan Roos. At the Stockholm Poetry Festival she will give interpretations of lyric poetry.

Photo: Sören Viiks

Monica Nielsen
Her voice is dramatic, distinct and dreamy. Mature like heavy red wine with scratch, rasp and heat. Monica Nielsen embraces the listener with her stormy voice and her infallible sense of pitch. Monica Nielsen herself is an institution. Already as an eight year old she started acting. Since then she has been studying in the Royal Dramatic theatre’s pupil school, she’s been a ballad singer at Nalen, an actress in movies like Flickan i regnet and Mannen på balkongen, and at the Royal Dramatic theatre in productions such as Hamlet and Tartuffe. She’s been on tour with Riksteatern, done cabarets at Hamburger Börs with Monica Zetterlund and Sonya Hedenbratt and she has also recorded albums. She has done TV, musicals, variety, you name it.

Together with Monica and Carl-Axel Dominique she will perform a tribute to the recently departed writer Lars Forssell, with a show based on his texts. The three of them were all good friends with the writer and Monica Nielsen and Monica Dominique have earlier released the CD Säg vad ni vill, with texts by above all Lars Forssell.

Monica Nielsen is now performing as the leading roll in Kristina Lugn’s play Hoppas jag hinner hem at Teater Brunnsgatan Fyra. After her performance on the 30th of November she has to hurry to make it to the Stockholm Poetry Festival and the celebration of her seventieth birthday!

Photo: Cato Lein

Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson
Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson, UKON in literary contexts, writes poetry with motion. Nothing stands still, noting remains the same for more than one line and the language playfully turns itself inside out. UKON was born in 1965 in Västerbotten, in the north of Sweden, but since the eighties he resides in Gothenburg.

He made his debut in 1990 with his poetry collection Kung-kung. Since then he has released nine collections of poetry. His latest work Synopsis came out earlier this year and he was recently awarded with the newspaper Göteborgsposten’s literature award and also nominated to Augustpriset. UKON also works as one of the editors in the magazine Glänta and translates poetry from French to English.

Photo: Cecilia Grönberg

Anna Piotrowska
Anna Piotrowska is one of Polen’s leading dancers and choreographers. She is as well-known for her expressive dancing as she is for her exciting choreographies. She was born in Czluchów 1974 and is an important driving force in the Polish cultural life: she has organized the Polish dance festival PolemiQi (2001) and is the founder of both Dance Theatre Distance (1995) and Dance Development Foundation in Warzawa (2003). She was awarded the British Council Award in 2004 and during the last few years she has lead several projects and workshops.

For Anna Piotrowska adventure implies creating movement and playing with the absurd. She sees the modern dance both as a way to reach self-knowledge, as well as a way for humans to develop sensibility and imagination, and her work is characterized by this play with the physical room. She will perform with two dance acts: the solo act n_not moved, and the act Mission, together with the dancer Patrycja Donska

Photo: Peter Peti

Ola Rapace
As an actor Ola Rapace picks his rolls after curiosity. He did his first feature film part in Lukas Moodyson’s Tillsammans (2000). Since then he has participated in several Wallander-movies, in the Danish TV-series Anna Pihl and in Susan Taslimi’s film Hus i Helvete. He also played one of Sweden’s most loved criminals in the TV-series Tusenbröder. In the theatre he has played a part in Lars Noréns Detaljer and the performance Krig at the Theatre Galeasen. Less known is probably his career as a musician – Ola Rapace has been a singer in the glam rock band Sissy Prozac. He is now a singer in the band La Nana who, according to Ola Rapace, plays ”electro music with a sense of gipsy”.

Eva Runefelt
Through slow strophe music and encapsulated desire Eva Runefelt forms the recycled time in the course of our senses. She twists and turns the difference between body and mind, the living and the dead, town and being. To hear lean down / the City’s fontanelle / And lay down in a / giant heart.” She has said that it is a hell to write but even worse not doing it: “I write / to have existed”.

Eva Runefelt, born 1953, made her debut with the novel I svackan 1975 but has since then devoted herself to poetry. Eva Runefelt’s poetry is not dated or ingratiating. Her now is spread through time and space without for that sake disturbing the intense presence. Time and death are reoccurring themes, as the direction inwards, inside the body, inside the heart. And this is where people who have a crush on poetry move on to loving it. In many ways Eva Runefelt reminds of Gunnar Ekelöf and his stalking of the body’s senses and impulses. At times it is almost as if he is the spring to her writing. Both of them have intelligent, thoroughly gone through texts and a giddy beautiful language.

Her latest work I ett förskingrat nu was released this year. Eva Runefelt has been commended and praised for her poetry. She has, among other awards, won the Swedish Radio’s lyric award, the Bellman award och Gerard Bonniers lyric award. In 2003 she received Ekelöfpriset with the motivation: ”because she in a marvellous way has melted down language, sensuality and time in her poetry and thereby emerged as a genuinely predecessor for what Ekelöf called “the mind of the body’s” experience in present Swedish poetry.

Photo: Cato Lein

Sofia Stenström
Sofia Stenström’s language is cocky, unconstrained and sensual, in her poems she plays with both language and reader. But there is also a hunger for love and seriousness carves in the game. Her language is varied; she shifts from escaping metaphors to puns, new formations, mixing of language to chat. The disharmony creates a rhythm in her poetry, close, insisting, intimate, until her words are under the skin.

Sofia Stenström was born in Stockholm 1978 and works as a writer and a translator. She has released two collections of poetry Venus Vanish (2005) and, this year, Klockan Ciao that has been commended for its strength and credibility. One critic writes that Sofia Stenström seems to want to do something with language that nobody has managed so far. Sofia Stenström herself says that she “choose the words as single actors and let them meet in the poems as if it was a stage – in an emergent, poetic now.”

Photo: Sofia Stenström

Ingrid Storholmen
Since her debut with Krypskyttarloven (2001) Ingrid Storholmen (f. 1976) is one of Norway’s most prominent poets. Besides writing poetry she is an active literature critic.

Ingrid Storholmen’s texts are thought-provoking. Through a play with paradoxes she investigates the meaning of heritage, motherhood, history and identity – different forms of belonging. “May I be a human with you, for a short while” as the protagonist in her latest book Skamtalen. Graceland expresses it.

Her texts both give and take, hurt and creates in the same movement. Through literary mutations and frenetic streams of words the poem is radicalised. She governs the conventional rules of poetry which makes her move freely both along and away from it. With her literary experiments she breaks new ground beyond genres.

Sara Stridsberg
Sara Stridsberg likes unconventional women. For the novel Drömfakulteten, a free fantasy on Valerie Solanas life (the author of S.C.U.M Manifesto), she was rewarded with the Nordic Council Literature Award. Previously she has written about the channel-swimmer Sally Bauer (in her debut novel Happy Sally) and translated the play Blasted by the British playwright Sarah Kane. Both of them women who, similarly to Valerie Solanas, balance on the edge of insanity.

Sara Stridsberg, born in Solna 1972, is besides being a writer and a translator also a freelance writer and a playwright. In the autumn of 2006 she made her debut as a dramatist when her play Valerie Jean Solanas ska bli president i Amerika premiered at Dramaten. As an educated (but non-practicing) jurist her writing becomes a refuge from the melancholy of reality, and in her feverish prose she get even with the repressive mechanisms of patriarchy by letting the marginalised woman play the leading part, while she examines the borderland between utopia and dystopia. At the Stockholm Poetry Festival she will read newly written material.

Photo: Annika von Hausswolff

Dariusz Suska
Dariusz Suska was born in 1968 in the Polish city Zlotoryja. He is an educated physicist, a practicing poet as well as the editor for the magazine Gazeta Wyborcza in Warzawa, where he also has his residence. He has published three collections of poetry of which two have been nominated to the prestigious NIKE Award.

His work is generally enlisted in a tradition subsequent to Baudelaire, his poetry return to observations of life’s equally possible as impossible nature, and is interlaced with questions about death, guilt and existence. A few of his poems have been translated into Swedish and can be read in the Swedish anthology 17 polska poeter (2003).

Thomas Öberg och Andreas Bertilsson
”More human and contact seeking, more liberating of the imagination and more thought rubbing then ever.” This is a description of the music that is generated when Thomas Öberg meets Andreas Bertilsson. In the crisp electro there is a trace of Swedish jazz tradition. You can almost touch the music, if you close your eyes you can smell it. Like finding yourself in an electronical forest with the volume turned up to the max and where the tone of the leaves hit the ground. Where frozen grass cracks, creaks and crash under slim summer shoes. The music is thin as air, at times transparent. A knick knack dream filled with equally much poetry as reality.

Earlier Andreas Bertilsson worked under the name Son Of Clay, his latest album Paramount was commended by the critics. Thomas Öberg is the singer in Bob Hund, Sci-Fi Skåne and Bergman Rock and has been praised for his energy on stage. He has won two Grammys for best singer and best lyrics. In Thomas Öberg’s and Andreas Bertilsson’s forest a door is slightly open, whining against the wind. The trees are dripping and suddenly the ground is made of concrete and the forest is transformed into a deserted warehouse where you are left alone. Despair echoes between the walls and condensates against your skin. Thomas Öberg’s lyrics fill the dream with touching stories of people and lives. With intimate whims he brings warmth and passion into the music. With his personal language he tells us about all the mistakes and suddenly we are not alone anymore. In 00TAL’s latest issue there is a long interview with Thomas Oberg about his view of our time.