Dmitrij Gawrisch and Maurin Baumann
Photo: Silviu Guiman
Dmitriy Gavrish, born in Kiev in 1982, writes prose, theatre plays, radio plays and literary reportage. He grew up in Bern and initially studied business administration and economics at the University of Bern. He then completed a drama processor at the Winkelwiese Theatre and a journalistic traineeship at the Handelszeitung, both in Zurich. Gavrish was invited to the Stückemarkt at the Berlin Theatertreffen in 2011 with his first play, ‘Brachland’. Further plays followed, including ‘Mal was Afrika’, ‘Wird schon werden’ and ‘Lessons of Leaking’ (with machina eX), which were performed on numerous stages in Germany and abroad. Gavrish won the Open Mike and was town clerk in Jena and Rottweil. He received a Grenzgänger scholarship from the Robert Bosch Foundation and the Literary Colloquium Berlin to work on his novel ‘Die geblieben sind’. Gavrish is a separated father of a seven-year-old son, works part-time as an editor at the magazine REPORTAGEN and commutes between Bern and Berlin.
Photo: David Fürst
Maurin Baumann was born in 1995 in Bern, where he still lives. He is studying cultural journalism at the Zurich University of the Arts. He previously graduated from the Literature Institute in Biel and wrote for the daily newspaper ‘Der Bund’ as part of an internship.
Project
‘What exactly do you want from me?’ the text asks, mocking: ‘I'm a couple of kilobytes stored on your computer. You have to give yourself the answers.’
And I think: this is all ridiculous! It’s somehow grown out of me, but I can’t see through it.
Do something meaningful, somehow. Something real. Simply not telling a story – absolutely no storytelling. That used to be what it was all about. Not being able to and still doing it.
‘You're nothing but a big Anyway," I shout back. Shapeless and confused, too.
‘I stand for your own turmoil’, the lyrics hiss. ‘Do you think that gives me pleasure – this existence as a dusty repository of failures?’
Pull yourself together. I wrote because I was told you could do it. I wrote in a time of deepest darkness and pain. Now I’m writing a book – and Dmitriy is helping me.
