Author
Bastian Böttcher

Born in 1974 in Bremen, German slam poet Bastian Böttcher studied at the Bauhaus University, Weimar ,and moved to Berlin in 2000.

Beginning in the early 90s, Böttcher developed his slam poetry as a form of rhythmic poetry physically performed on the stage. In 1991, with DJ Loris Negro, he founded the band centrifugal, which broke up in July 2001.

As co-founder of the German poetry slam scene, he won several times the Poetry Slam prize of Literature Workshop Berlin. The Goethe-Institut invited him to a guest performance at the German - Nuyorican Poetry Festival in New York. It was followed by appearances in the Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin), in the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, at the Munich Chamber games and in various literary centers of Copenhagen, to Vienna.

Böttcher is considered the first German slam poet. In 1997, he won the first German Poetry Slam Championships.

After album and anthology publications, his first major literary work, the novel megahertz (Red Book), appeared in September 2004. In spring 2006 he published "This is not a concert," a collection of his stage texts. Since 2000, Bas Böttcher has been working with Berlin filmmaker and Slam Master Wolf Hogekamp on the development and establishment of the poetry clip format. In 2005, he passed his thesis on Poetry Clips. In 2005, he published (with Wolf Hogekamp) DVD, Poetry Clips (Vol 1).

For the 2006 Frankfurt Book Fair, Böttcher built TEXTBOX, a speaker cab made of Plexiglas for performance poets. Using headphones, the audience can listen to the lyrics in studio quality. The TEXTBOX has since been exhibited at the book fairs of Beijing, Taipei, Abu Dhabi, Guadalajara and São Paulo as well as at the Centre Pompidou (Paris) and in the Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin).

Since 2012, Bas Böttcher has been a visiting lecturer in language and performance at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig.

(Entry adapted from Wikipedia)

E-lit works by this author