“My texts are sound waves. They take place on literary stages, in self-created media formats, in literary venues, in clubs, in libraries, at festivals, and in online streams.”

Bas Böttcher was born in Bremen and has lived in Berlin since 2000. He studied at the Bauhaus University in Weimar.

First German-language slam poet
Bas Böttcher is regarded as one of the co-founders of the German-language spoken word and poetry slam scene. He won the first German-language Poetry Slam Championships. His texts are considered exemplary of contemporary performance poetry. They are published in school textbooks (Schroedel, Cornelsen, Klett) and in major anthologies of German poetry (Der Neue Conrady, Lyrikstimmen, among others). In 2005, together with Wolf Hogekamp, he released the first Poetry Clip DVD (Voland & Quist / Lingua Video). He has also published three poetry collections with Voland & Quist: Dies ist kein Konzert, Neonomade, and Vorübergehende Schönheit.

Bas Böttcher has performed, among other venues, in the Grand Hall of the Elbphilharmonie, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris), at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin), at Schloss Bellevue (Berlin), at the Culture Palace (Warsaw), and at the book fairs in Beijing, Guadalajara, Moscow, São Paulo, and Bangkok.

Media art
Bas Böttcher is the inventor and programmer of various media formats for poetry. He developed the electronic hypertext Looppool, the poetry platform poetenplanet.de (online residency of the Literaturhaus Bremen), and the interactive online word playground wortsport.org as a new form of expression on the internet, as well as the Poetry Clip as an audiovisual format and the interactive poetry machine hoelderfication.de for the German Literature Archive in Marbach. The Textbox, invented and built by Böttcher, has been exhibited worldwide as an innovative platform for live performances, including at the Woerdz Festival (Lucerne), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), and at numerous book fairs from Taipei to New Delhi to Abu Dhabi.

Teaching and mediation
Bas Böttcher has taught at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig, the German Literature Archive Marbach, the Baden-Württemberg Academy of Culture, the Berlin University of the Arts, Goethe Institutes worldwide, and at German international schools in Madrid, Rome, Shanghai, Beijing, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, Windhoek, Mexico City, Bogotá, Melbourne, Brisbane, Paris, and Singapore, as well as at the United Nations School in New York City.

Awards and distinctions
1997 First winner of the German-language Poetry Slam Championships, Berlin
1998 Pegasus Special Award from Die ZEIT, ARD Online, and IBM for new forms of expression on the internet
2000 Artist-in-residence grant from the Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM), Karlsruhe
2005 Artist-in-residence grant at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris
2015 Online residency at Literaturhaus Bremen
2024 Humboldt Spoken Word Poet at Humboldt University Berlin
2025 Weilheim Literature Prize

Festivals and tours
1996 German–Nuyorican Poetry Festival, New York City, USA
1999 Euro San Francisco Poetry Festival, San Francisco, USA
1999 NewPOP Festival, Baden-Baden, Germany
2013 Bangalore Literature Festival, Bangalore, India
2015 Bali Literature Festival, Bali, Indonesia
2013–2023 Poetry on the Road, Bremen, Germany

Projects
Since 2022, Bas Böttcher has organized and curated the LOGOSKOP series at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin for Humboldt University, where scientific collections are accompanied by literary interventions. He organized the literary program for the German Pavilion at EXPO 2015 in Milan. For refugee children and adolescents, he organized the international writing workshop project NEU|ropa. He organized the German-language Poetry Slam Championships in 1999 and the German-language U20 Poetry Slam Championships in 2024.

Civic engagement and honorary work
Böttcher is a member of the board of trustees of Fonds Soziokultur and serves in an honorary capacity on the board of the Federal Association of the Friedrich Bödecker Circles. For four years, he was a jury member of the national Lyrix competition. He also served on the advisory board for the initiative Kultur macht stark for the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.