Alma Larsen

Alma Larsen was born on 15 March 1945 in Kyritz, in what is now Brandenburg, and grew up in Berlin. A death notice later published by the Süddeutsche Zeitung gives that full date of birth. Her father died while she was still young. She later told Sabine Reithmaier of the Süddeutsche Zeitung that she had no desire, at that point, to take the Abitur.

In 1967 she moved to Munich. Looking back, she called the reason a completely silly argument: Munich was a day closer to Italy than Berlin, and she was an enthusiast for Italy. Once there she completed the Abitur and studied political science, taking a diploma. She began to write in the mid-1970s.

Larsen's first poems were feminist protest pieces. One of them, Männerlied, was sent to the Hamburg magazine Stern and printed there soon afterwards. She later said that this early ease made her think publication would continue to come so simply, and that the expectation was not helpful to her development as a writer.

From 1980 she worked as a freelance author in Munich, publishing lyric poetry, essays and short prose and appearing in literary performances with artists from other disciplines. She also worked as a photographer until 2004. Her first collection, Verrichtungen, appeared as a private printing in Munich in 1983. Later volumes included ... notfalls morgen einen Kater (Verlag Annegret Meyer, 1990), Steine Klopfen (1996), Pupillen Randgedichte (1998), Fliegt auf rot (Edition malandrin, 2003), Welle vorwärts (Edition malandrin, 2006), Im Nacken ein Luftzug (Spielberg Verlag, 2012) and Nase Stimme Haut (Spielberg Verlag, 2016). She also published collaborative books, among them Kunst am Bein, poems with drawings by Samuel Rachl (2000), and Doppel Stier Gymnastik hach!, a poetic dialogue with Merve Lowien (2002). In October 2022 the Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote about Augenblicke nach innen, which it described as her eighth book of poems.

Alongside her own writing she organised literary series and events. She ran café-sätze, a monthly series of literary conversations at the Seidlvilla in Munich, and conceived programmes for GEDOK Munich. From 1997 to 2003 she served as a specialist adviser to GEDOK Munich. In 1996 she received a working stipend from the Kunstverein Kühlungsborn. A 1989 grant from the Munich literature year and the 2003 Hohenzollern Poetry Prize of the Lyrik Kabinett in Munich are recorded in her festival biographies.

In 2012 she joined Augusta Laar, initiator of the Schamrock salon of women poets, and the publisher Sarah Ines Struck to curate the first Schamrock Festival of Women Poets at the Pasinger Fabrik. About 40 women poets from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, South Tyrol and Finland took part. Festival pages describe Larsen as a founding member of Schamrock e.V. and a co-organiser of that first festival. German Wikipedia calls her a co-founder of the festival.

Larsen made Munich her home from 1967 onwards. Public accounts of her life concentrate on her work as a writer, photographer and organiser rather than on family details. In the 2022 Süddeutsche Zeitung portrait she summed up her path in a single sentence: she had always done what she wanted. That independence ran through her decision to leave Berlin, her early feminist poems, her photography and the volunteer labour of building rooms in which other women writers could be heard.

Alma Larsen died on 2 November 2026 at the age of 81. A death notice on the Süddeutsche Zeitung memorial pages records the dates 15 March 1945 and 2 November 2026. German Wikipedia cited that notice, which was posted in the first week of November 2026. No cause of death and no place of death were given in the public notice. On the same memorial page the composer Viola Kramer wrote a tribute dated 7 November, thanking Larsen for their friendship and for the chance to set her texts to music.

Larsen is remembered in Munich both as a poet of close looking and as someone who spent years making space for other women's voices. The Schamrock Festival of Women Poets, which she helped launch in 2012, grew out of Augusta Laar's salon and became a regular meeting place for German-language and European women poets. Her own books, from the privately printed Verrichtungen to Augenblicke nach innen, trace a career that moved from protest lyric into a quieter attention to the senses, a shift she described in Kopf und Bauch when she wrote that a poem's words would grow bored without the impressions the senses keep offering them.

The German Literature Archive in Marbach records her as a photographer, writer and lyric poet. Readers, fellow organisers and musicians such as Viola Kramer have spoken of what they learned from her texts and from knowing her.