BIOGRAPHY

Poet and translator Michael Hofmann was born in Freiburg, West Germany in 1957. The son of the German novelist Gert Hofmann, his translation of his father's novel The Film Explainer won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 1995. He grew up in England and attended schools in Edinburgh and Winchester. He read English Literature and Classics at Magdalene College, Oxford, and studied as a postgraduate at the University of Regensburg and Trinity College, Cambridge from 1979 to 1983. Since 1983 he has worked as a freelance writer, translator and reviewer. Since 1993, he has held a half-time position at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and in 1994, he was Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Michael Hofmann has translated work by Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Roth, Patrick Süskind, Herta Mueller and Franz Kafka. He has twice won the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (Translators' Association), first in 1988 for his adaptation of The Double Bass by Patrick Süskind (1987), and again in 1993 for his translation of Wolfgang Koeppen's Death in Rome (1992). His published poetry includes Nights In The Iron Hotel (1983), which won the Cholmondeley Award; Acrimony (1986), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Corona, Corona (1993) and Approximately Nowhere (1999).

In 1994 he co-edited After Ovid: New Metamorphoses with James Lasdun, which included contributions by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. Behind the Lines: Pieces on Writing and Pictures, a collection of Michael

Hofmann's reviews from the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, the New York Times and The Times was published in 2001. Michael Hofmann lives in London. In 2005, he edited the Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems. He has twice been the winner of the Weidenfeld Translation Prize and his Selected Poems was published in 2008.

GENRES (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER)

Criticism, Poetry, Translation

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nights In The Iron Hotel Faber and Faber, 1983
Castle Gripsholm (translator) Chatto & Windus, 1985
Acrimony Faber and Faber, 1986
The Double Bass (translator) Hamish Hamilton, 1987
Blösch (translator) Faber and Faber, 1988
Balzac's Horse and Other Stories (translator) Secker & Warburg, 1989
Emotion Pictures (translator with Shaun Whiteside) Faber and Faber, 1989
The Good Person of Sichuan (translator) Methuen, 1989
The Legend of the Holy Drinker (translator) Chatto & Windus, 1989
Right and Left (translator) Chatto & Windus, 1991
The Logic of Images (translator) Faber and Faber, 1991
Death in Rome (translator) Hamish Hamilton, 1992
The Story of Mr Sommer (translator) Bloomsbury, 1992
Corona, Corona Faber and Faber, 1993
After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (edited with James Lasdun) Faber and Faber, 1994
The Film Explainer (translator) Secker & Warburg, 1995
The Lord Chandos Letter (translator) Syrens, 1995
The Man Who Disappeared (translator) Penguin, 1996
The Act of Seeing (translator) Faber and Faber, 1997
Penguin Modern Poets 13 (Robin Robertson, Michael Hofmann, Michael Longley) Penguin, 1998
Pollen Room (translator) Bloomsbury, 1998
The Land of Green Plums (translator) Granta, 1998
The String of Pearls (translator) Granta, 1998
Approximately Nowhere Faber and Faber, 1999
Rebellion (translator) Granta, 1999
Agnes (translator) Bloomsbury, 2000
My Time with Antonioni (translator) Faber and Faber, 2000
Arturo Di Stefano (with John Berger and Christopher Lloyd) Merrell, 2001
Behind the Lines: Pieces on Writing and Pictures Faber and Faber, 2001
Robert Lowell (editor) Faber and Faber, 2001
The Collected Shorter Fiction of Joseph Roth (translator) Granta, 2001
The Wandering Jews (translator) Granta, 2001
Wim Wenders on Film (translator) Faber and Faber, 2001
Luck (translator) Harvill, 2002
The Hothouse (translator) Granta, 2002
The Radetzky March (translator) Granta, 2002
The Snowflake Constant (translator) Faber and Faber, 2002
A Sad Affair (translator) Granta, 2003
Storm of Steel (translator) Allen Lane, 2003
John Berryman (editor) Faber and Faber, 2004
Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925-1939 (translator) Granta, 2004
Party in the Blitz (translator) Harvill, 2005
The Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems (editor) Faber and Faber, 2005
Ashes for Breakfast (translator) Faber and Faber, 2006
Frost (translator) Knopf, 2006
In Strange Gardens (translator) Other Press, 2006
Metamorphosis and other stories (translator) Penguin, 2006
Mother Courage and her Children (translator) Methuen, 2006
The Zürau Aphorisms (translator) Harvill Secker, 2006
Child of All Nations (translator) Penguin, 2007
Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl (translator) New Directions, 2007
The Voyage That Never Ends (editor) New York Review of Books, 2007
On a Day Like This (translator) Other Press, 2008
Selected Poems Faber and Faber, 2008
The Seventh Well (translator) Granta, 2008

PRIZES AND AWARDS

1984 Cholmondeley Award Nights In The Iron Hotel
1988 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize Acrimony
1988 Schlegel-Tieck Prize (Translators' Association) The Double Bass
1993 Schlegel-Tieck Prize (Translators' Association) Death in Rome
1995 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize The Film Explainer
1997 Arts Council Writers' Award Approximately Nowhere
1998 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (for translation) The Land of Green Plums
1999 PEN/Book of the Month Club Translation Prize The String of Pearls
2004 Weidenfeld Translation Prize Storm of Steel
2007 Weidenfeld Translation Prize Ashes for Breakfast

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE

Michael Hofmann was four when he came to England. His poetic mentor is Robert Lowell and he translates from German. No one else has a profile remotely like this and Hofmann's work shows it. His poetry is icily descriptive, seemingly emotionally uninvolved. When he appears in his poems he is usually painted as a nervous, unhappy misfit: 'I feel spiritless, unhappy, the wrong age', 'I was aphasic, incapable of speech, / worn down by tolerance and inclusion'. He has a genius for thumbnail summation, often expressed in syllepsis (phrases which yoke dissimilar objects and concepts into the same list), for example 'wearing a pleasant frown and pre-stressed denims'. This gift is finely suited to contemporary cultural phenomena, for example his poem 'Marvin Gaye', in which the delineation of popular culture is cruelly accurate: 'He preached sex to the cream suits, the halter tops and the drug-induced personality disorders' The poem ends 'A dog collar shot a purple dressing gown' (Gaye was murdered by his father, a preacher). The element of cruelty and detachment in his work limits his popular appeal but description as wickedly accurate as this will always have its advocates. Hofmann's most successful poems are probably those that evoke the mood of an era, Thatcherite Britain or post-Bomb Europe. His descriptive gifts and sense of detachment make him the ideal poet for this: 'We are living in the long shadow of the Bomb - A fat Greenpeace whale, simplified and schematic Like the sign "lavatories for the handicapped", Its whirling genitals a small outboard swastika...' ('Shapes of Things') '´50s Cuba' is briskly summed up: 'It was the farcical, fast, fast slow world Of dancing, miscegenation and cigars...' In '47º Latitude' Chernobyl casts its malign shadow: 'It was the double-zero summer, where the birds Stunned themselves on the picture windows With no red bird cardboard cut-out doubles to warn them, Where the puffball dandelion grew twice as high' Hofmann is particularly good at evoking the seedy underbelly of Thatcherism. 'Albion Market' paints an urban England '...stripped to the skin trade. Sex and security / Arsenal boot boys, white slaves and the SAS'. A huge figure looming over Hofmann's life was his novelist father Gert. Hofmann has written many poems about the difficult relationship father and son had. Gert Hofmann died in 1993 and Hofmann's most recent book, Approximately Nowhere (1999) has a more forgiving tone. This book also has the most personal poems Hofmann has written, about a new relationship: 'I keep my balls coddled in your second-best lace panties'. Peter Forbes, 2002

AUTHOR STATEMENT

'Why I write? With the example of my father before me as I was growing up, it was all I ever wanted, or felt fitted to do. In obedience to a genetic imperative - my father wrote 12 novels in 12 years and dropped dead, my (maternal) grandfather edited the Brockhaus Encyclopaedia. Out of allegiance to certain twentieth century practitioners, in particular Lowell, Brodsky, Benn and Montale. To bring confusion to my languages, and clarity to myself.'