Putting the region into words: Charlotte Krafft becomes regional writer for the Münsterland region

Discover, track down, describe in literature: Starting in March 2020, Charlotte Krafft will go on a four-month journey through Münsterland and report on the region as a regional writer in the state-wide literature project stadt.land.text NRW. She is one of ten authors selected for the second edition of the project and will each receive a scholarship of 7200 euros.

The 28-year-old Charlotte Krafft goes in search of answers on her tour of discovery in Münsterland. "Why do almost all visions of the future always refer and relate to urban conurbations, and why does the development of places and landscapes with monumental value hardly ever play a role in them?" asks the daughter of two landscape architects, who has a soft spot for science fiction, horror and fantasy. On her journey through town and country, she wants to find out "whether the rural space, the village, the small town might not also serve as an undescribed space of hope precisely because of its neglect in speculative literature".

Charlotte Krafft studied German literature in Berlin and literary writing at the Literature Institute in Leipzig. With three author friends, she founded the Rich Kids of Literature, a collective that uses public events and actions to open up new target groups and promote young authors with interesting literary approaches. "We are not only excited about the stories and people Charlotte Kraft is tracking down in Münsterland, but also about the words she finds for our region," emphasises Andre Sebastian, head of the cultural office of Münsterland e.V. The stadt.land.text NRW project goes back to an idea of the cultural region of Aachen, which tested the format and took the lead in implementing it for ten cultural regions in North Rhine-Westphalia for the first time in 2017. It is funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science and the cultural offices of the Regional Cultural Policy.

"The second edition of the stadt.land.text NRW residency project has once again met with great interest among authors. I am very pleased that we have once again found ten promising regional writers who take their very own look at North Rhine-Westphalia and bring the different facets of the cultural regions to life in a literary way in their texts," said Minister of Culture and Science Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen.

The scholarship holders will travel through the ten cultural regions of North Rhine-Westphalia - Aachen, Bergisches Land, Hellweg, Münsterland, Niederrhein, Ostwestfalen-Lippe, Rheinschiene, Ruhrgebiet, Sauerland and Südwestfalen - and present their texts on the blog stadt.land.text NRW 2020 (www.stadt-land-text.de) and at readings. The public closing event will take place on 22 June 2020 in the Weltkunstzimmer Düsseldorf.