Sand Journal

SAND was founded in 2009 by Becky Crook. In the years since, our large, evolving team has published more than two thousand pages of visual art and English-language fiction, nonfiction, and poetry (including translations) from fifty countries and territories. We have a particular interest in work by women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and people from marginalized locations. Stories that first appeared in SAND have been included in three Best Small Fictions anthologies and were nominated for a Stack award. Contributing poets have been honored with the Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry, the Brunel International African Literature Prize, the Georg Büchner Prize, a New York Times Best Poetry of the Year listing, and the European Union Award for Literature. Our translators have received the US National Translation Award and been named the Literary Translator of the London Book Fair. SAND is part of Berlin’s lively independent literary and art scene. We periodically host events – including our well-known twice-annual launch parties – and collaborate with the creative communities of Berlin, Europe, and the wider world. In May 2020, during the coronavirus lockdown, we hosted a weekend-long live-streamed festival of readings, artist talks, music, animations, and discussions to mark our tenth anniversary and twenty-first issue. Larger projects have included a literary immersive theater performance about Elizabeth Barrett Browning in a Berlin cemetery, our Translating the Untranslatable workshop at A-Festival in Vietnam, a workshop and exhibition during the Stadtsprachen festival of local non-German-language literatures, and the Found in Translation retreat for emerging literary translators back in 2013. We also co-judged the Berlin Writing Prize with The Reader in 2017 and held a Quick.SAND contest for flash fiction in 2015.