Projects: Green Library
About the project
In 2020, we carried out the Green Library project and received funding from the Berlin Senate for it. We invited Berlin-based authors to discuss their books, nature writing, nature and the environment with us.
On this page you will find a documentation of the project and further book recommendations for your ‘Green Library’.
Green Library
Small Bodies of Water
In her collection of essays, we move with Powles between London, where she currently lives, Shanghai, China and Aotearoa-New Zealand. She talks about growing up in Wellington with the constant fear of a major earthquake, how she prepares her own tofu during the coronavirus lockdown, and her connection to the kōwhai tree.
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Uprooting – From the Caribbean to the Countryside
Marchelle Farrell's Nature Memoir Uprooting - From the Caribbean to the Countryside is an emotional search for a place to put down roots. She didn't expect this place to be a small village in Somerset.
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Ideas to postpone the end of the world
Ailton Krenak’s Ideas to postpone the end of the world (translated from Portuguese by Anthony Doyle) is a slim volume bursting with important ideas. Krenak is a philosopher and socio-environmental activist for Indigenous rights from the Krenak homelands along the Doce River.
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Undrowned
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs is one of the strangest books I have read recently - and I mean that in an extremely positive way. I admit I had to get into it first, but then this unusual way of talking about dolphins, whales, seals and co. in connection with Black experiences won me over.
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The way through the woods
Regardless of whether you've ever been mushroom picking or not, if you read Long Litt Woon's The way through the woods: Overcoming grief through nature, you are sure to develop a fascination for it.
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Bruce Pascoe and Dark Emu: A Green Library Conversation (Part 2)
In the second part of the interview, Bruce Pascoe talks about ancient places, buildings and practices of Indigenous Australians that are valuable for a more sustainable future. He also introduces the publishing house Magabala Books.
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Bruce Pascoe and Dark Emu: A Green Library Conversation (Part 1)
In the course of our Green Library series, we were lucky enough to chat to the acclaimed author of Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture about this earlier book and his work cultivating Aboriginal farming methods on his farm in eastern Victoria.
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Green Library – a year in review
The year 2020 is coming to an end, and our Green Library series with it. Here's a short retrospective.
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Ecocriticism and Postcolonialism: When Land Remembers
Ecocriticism is a concept with an interdisciplinary approach that emerged in the United States to examine the different ways in which people imagine human relationships to nature and the environment, and how they portray it in books, films and works of art. Escpecially in combination with postcolonialism, ecocriticism offers incredible potential for analysis.
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“More insects than in Madrid“: an Interview with Inger-Maria Mahlke
As part of our Green Library series, we spoke to Inger-Maria Mahlke about her novel Archipel, which was published by Rowohlt in 2018 and awarded the German Book Prize. Our conversation was about nature, class and colonialism.
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Tulsi
With a heavy sigh and an uncanny discomfort, her untrained fingers dug around the plant. Suddenly, her nostrils were filled with a pungent smell which was possibly coming from the dead leaves lying around. What she could not understand was the untimely death of the Tulsi plants in her courtyard every monsoon season.
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Ode to the Dandelion
An original essay for our Green Library series on writing nature and the environment.
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What Rights does Nature have? with Sumana Roy
This year's international literature festival Berlin has placed particular emphasis on alternative and sustainable economic forms. Poco.lit. visited an event presenting Sumana Roy's contribution.
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The Hungry Tide
Amitav Ghosh's novel asks a fundamental question: What is more worthy of protection, human life or the environment?
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The Grassling
In The Grassling, Burnett manages to write so elegantly and touchingly about nature, and what people can learn from it, that big issues suddenly feel more tangible.
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In Search of Better Skies: An Interview with Jennifer Neal
On the 8th of July 2020, Jennifer Neal joined us on zoom and gave us some insights into her work. She is an Australian-American writer, artist and occasional stand-up comedian who currently lives in Berlin. She has published short stories and a wide array of journalistic articles and essays, and has recently finished a novel. Jennifer talked to us about writing nature and environment, and shared some thoughts on speculative fiction.
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(Post-)Colonialism and the Botanical Gardens at Potsdam
Understanding botanical gardens as colonial sites seems particularly difficult: their plant inhabitants present themselves as too innocent, too splendid and too lively to be associated with colonial violence, white appropriation and hegemonic systems of knowledge production.
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“In Search of Better Skies”
Jennifer Neal’s short story, “In Search of Better Skies”, was published in The Willowherb Review in 2019 and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. In it, Neal’s narrator describes the major movements of her grandfather’s life.
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Dark Emu
When I started reading Bruce Pascoe’s account of “Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture”, as Dark Emu is billed on the cover, I must confess I didn’t expect it to be page-turner. But it is.
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Turning: A Swimming Memoir
In her book Turning: A Swimming Memoir, Jessica J. Lee relates how swimming in the lakes of Berlin and Brandenburg not only helped her feel at home in this region, but also helped her work through a painful love story and childhood fears.
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Two Trees Make a Forest
Jessica J. Lee’s Two Trees Make a Forest is part ode to Taiwan, part loving meditation on the natural world, and part investigative journey into a family’s lost histories.
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Green Library: Event Series
Poco.Lit. is delighted to announce our event series GREEN LIBRARY.
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