Michael Hofmann

Michael Hofmann Poems

Michael Hofmann Biography

Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet who writes in English and a translator of texts from German. Michael Hofmann is the son of the German novelist Gert Hofmann. Hofmann's family first moved to Bristol in 1961, and later to Edinburgh. He was educated at Winchester College and then studied English Literature and Classics. In 1979 he received a BA and in 1984 an MA from the University of Cambridge. In 1983 he started working as a freelance writer, translator, and literary critic. Hofmann has held a visiting professorship at the University of Michigan and currently teaches poetry workshops at the University of Florida. He splits his time between London and Gainesville. In 2008, Hofmann was Poet-in-Residence in the state of Queensland in Australia. He has two sons, Max (1991) and Jakob (1993). Hofmann received the Cholmondeley Award in 1984 for Nights in the Iron Hotel and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1988 for Acrimony. The same year, he also received the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for his translation of Patrick Süskind's The Double-Bass. In 1993 he received the Schlegel-Tieck Prize again for his translation of Wolfgang Koeppen's Death in Rome. Hofmann was awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 1995 for the translation of his father's novel The Film Explainer, and Michael was nominated again in 2003 for his translation of Peter Stephan Jungk's The Snowflake Constant. In 1997 he received the Arts Council Writer's Award for his collection of poems Approximately Nowhere, and the following year he received the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his translation of Herta Müller's novel The Land of Green Plums. In 1999 Hofmann was awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for his translation of Joseph Roth's The String of Pearls. In 2000 Hofmann was selected as the recipient of the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his translation of Joseph Roth's novel Rebellion (Die Rebellion). In 2003 he received another Schlegel-Tieck Prize for his translation of his father's Luck, and in 2004 he was awarded the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for his translation of Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel. In 2005 Hofmann received his fourth Schlegel-Tieck Prize for his translation of Gerd Ledig's The Stalin Organ. Hofmann served as a judge for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002, and in 2006 Hofmann made the Griffin's international shortlist for his translation of Durs Grünbein's Ashes for Breakfast.)

The Best Poem Of Michael Hofmann

Night

It's all right
Unless you're either lonely or under attack.
That strange effortful
Repositioning of yourself. Laundry, shopping,
Hours, the telephone—unless misinformed—
Only ever ringing for you, if it ever does.
The night—yours to decide,
Among drink, or books, or lying there.
On your back, or curled up.

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