© Agata Koch
Author, Translator
Born in Lublin, Poland, she spent her early childhood years in Podlasie. She is a Germanist (MA from the University of Leipzig), language lecturer, and translator. Since 2012, she has initiated and led SprachCafé Polnisch in Berlin — an open educational and cultural project considered a model for local migrant initiatives (www.sprachcafe-polnisch.org). Her motto is: “People create places. Encounters matter.”
After completing her studies, she settled in Berlin in 1990. Since 2000, she has lived with her family in the northern district of Pankow. Alongside her work as a cultural mediator, she is active as a writer, photographer, and visual artist. At the center of her interests are the perception of the everyday, the aesthetics of details, and questions of proximity and distance, light and shadow — in both personal and social spaces.
Literary and Artistic Work Agata Koch develops her texts from a consistently bilingual perspective: German and Polish exist in a productive dialogue, shaping both her poetic and narrative voice. Since 2015, she has worked continuously in Berlin creative writing workshops and is part of a literary network of Polish- and German-speaking female authors.
Her poems have been published in blogs and anthologies; in 2020, her first bilingual volume of poetry and photography, “Pachniesz słońcem / Du duftest wie die Sonne” (You Smell Like the Sun), was published by the Berlin-based Treibgut Verlag, supplemented by audio recordings. In 2024, “Magnolia – glückliche Orte verbinden. Begegnungen in der Vergangenheit und heute” (Magnolia – Connecting Happy Places. Encounters in the Past and Today) was published in Poland — a prose work with photographs that forms the basis for an upcoming German version.
In parallel, since 2012, she has been publishing texts and photographs, as well as reflections on multilingualism in the context of SprachCafé Polnisch. She understands writing as a form of crossing borders — between languages, spaces of memory, and generations. Her body of work also includes numerous solo and group exhibitions of her photography, collages, and paintings.
Websites:
Events
Magnolias
Fri, 10. Jul // 18:00,
Maschinenhaus (Kulturbrauerei) entrance: Knaackstraße 97, 10435 Berlin
