Of Childhood Landscapes, Trees and Gardens
An Evening with Lutz Seiler
6/27/2026, 7:30 PM

For the poet Lutz Seiler, the rustling of the trees is a language in its own right; poems are ways of understanding it: “it is a tree/ & where a tree stands so free/ it must speak”. At his workplace in Wilhelmshorst, in the Mark Brandenburg, the day begins with walks in the garden, sheltered by the tall trees, beneath the canopy of pines. Stepping out into nature sharpens the senses to inner and outer beauty, opening one’s awareness to the substance of things.

In his novels Kruso and Stern 111, for which Lutz Seiler won the German Book Prize and the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, landscapes are also spaces of memory in which history is concealed, where what has been buried and hidden comes to light.

In conversation with Matthias Weichelt, editor-in-chief of the literary journal SINN UND FORM, published by the Akademie der Künste, the discussion will focus on how the sounds and colours of nature become poetry and which paths lead back to the landscapes of childhood.