Volksbühne
am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz

Don Mee Choi: KAUMKRIEG / Freely Frayed

With Don Mee Choi, Uljana Wolf, Lotta Thießen

Book Launch

Friday, October 30, 2026

7:00 pm

Grüner Salon

To mark the publication of the German translation of Hardly War – KAUMKRIEG, published by Spector Books – and the new collection Freely Frayed, published by Wave Books and And Other Stories, Don Mee Choi (Fellow 2019) joins us for an evening of conversation and reading.

KAUMKRIEG weaves the personal and the political into a poetry that moves between memoir, libretto, collage, archival material, and drawings. Drawing on materials belonging to her father, who worked as a press photographer during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Choi explores memory, origins, and history in the shadow of the Korean War (1950–1953), the “hardly war of all wars.” Here, poetry and geopolitics become inseparable twin sisters.

Freely Frayed likewise moves between memory, language, and history. The collection brings together early poems, essays, and translation notes, revealing the poetic foundations of Choi’s KOR-US Trilogy. Her texts examine the political conditions of language and distance, colonial history, and identity – and understand memory itself as a form of translation.

In conversation with Uljana Wolf and Lotta Thießen, Choi discusses translation and transference, personal memory and geopolitical remembrance, and a poetry that creates new connections across languages, times, and forms.

Don Mee Choi was born in Seoul, South Korea. She is the author of the KOR-US Trilogy: Mirror Nation (2024), DMZ Colony (2020, National Book Award), and Hardly War (2016). She has received fellowships from, among others, the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Lannan, and Whiting Foundations, as well as the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. Her translations of the poetry of Kim Hyesoon have received numerous awards. She lives and works in Berlin.

Uljana Wolf is a poet and translator. Her most recent publications include muttertask (2023), her translation of Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Kolonie (2023), and, together with Sool Park, Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiographie des Todes (2025). 

Lotta Thießen is a poet and translator from Portuguese and English.

In cooperation with Spector Books.

The book launch is in English.

For more information and the most recent event updates, please visit the website of DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program or Instagram @daad_artists.