Join us for an evening of readings and performances to celebrate the launch of SAND 27 — and the 15-year anniversary of SAND 🥳

SAND 27: Bridging features poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and art spanning the bold and the subdued, the playful and the introspective. Published in the 15th year of SAND, this summer issue is a celebration of work created in the margins, and an invitation to reach out for what’s on the other side.

Founded 2009, SAND is a non-profit literary and art journal published twice a year by a team from Berlin's international community. Featuring work by writers, translators, and artists from around the world, SAND seeks out fresh and underrepresented perspectives.

SAND 27 LAUNCH PROGRAMME | Live readings and performances from our Berlin-based contributors:

NICOL NAVAS (poetry, SAND 27) is a poet and playwright born 2001 in Cúcuta, whose work explores the complexities of urban realities and identity. With a BA in Comparative Literature, she relocated to Berlin for an MA in British Studies (Culture), where she has been a Resident of the MOC Art Residency Program.

RALPH THARAYIL (poetry, SAND 27) is a Swiss writer and translator of South Indian descent. His critically acclaimed debut novel Nimm die Alpen weg (Roll Back the Mountains) was published in 2023. It was recognized with the Alfred Döblin-Medal as well as the Terra Nova Prize by Switzerland’s Schiller Foundation. An excerpt from Nimm die Alpen weg, translated into English by Jon Cho-Polizzi, appears in SAND 27.

SASHA KURLYKA (fiction, SAND 27) is a Kyiv-born Berlin-based artist and writer. Their work has been published pseudonymously (as i0 xen0) in digital and physical publications by becoming.press. Their upcoming artist book How do we know what we know about hormones is planned for publication in 2024 by HumDrum Press.

ÖZGECAN KESICI (poetry in translation, SAND 27) is a writer and translator whose works have been published by Dedalus Press, Banshee, and Poetry Ireland Review, among others. She translated Rakhymzhan Otarbayev’s Kazakh short stories (Dağyeli Verlag, 2022) and has received the Irish Arts Council Literature Bursary for her poetry and the Berlin Senate Work Stipend for her prose.

OZAN ZAKARIYA KESKINKILIÇ (poetry, SAND 27) is a Berlin-based writer and poet. His debut Prinzenbad was published by ELIF Verlag in 2022. His poems have been printed in various literary journals, magazines and anthologies and have been translated into different languages, including English, Italian, Kazakh and Czech. This year, Keskinkılıç was nominated for the Heidelberg-Clemens- Brentano and the Dresden-Poetry-Prize.

SEDEF KARAYEL (art, SAND 27) was born in 1991 in Cyprus, and currently lives in Berlin, where she is studying for a PhD in neurosciences. Her work is an exploration of themes like incompleteness, uncertainty. Objects she makes with clay, photos of these objects, paintings of the photos: All revolve around themselves, still they change.

YURIKA SAITO (art, SAND 27) expresses the cycle of life and eternity through abstract paintings, embroidery, and plant dyeing. Based on her own experience of suffering from gender identity and experiencing the differences in the nature and culture of various lands, she puts the natural interpretation of being oneself into her attempts to communicate with the viewer.

Doors & drinks from 7:00 PM

Readings & performances from 7:30 PM 

A general admission ticket (€5) helps us cover the costs of renting the venue 🥂

The launch ticket + SAND 27 print bundle (€18) gives you a special discount on your print copy of SAND 27. Just show your bundle ticket at the magazine table on the night, and we'll give you your copy to take home 📚

The SAND supporter bundle (€22) includes the above, plus a small additional donation to help sustain our independent, self-funded publishing project and pay small honoraria to the creatives we publish 🎁