Hofmann, Michael

(1957- )

   Born in Freiburg, West Germany, son of the German novelist Gert Hofmann (1931-1993), he grew up in the U.K. and now lives in London. His translation of his father's novel-The Film Explainerwon the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 1995. He was educated in Edinburgh and Winchester, Magdalene College, Oxford (where he read English literature and classics), Trinity College, Cambridge and at the University of Regensburg, Bavaria. Since 1983 he has worked as a freelance writer, translator and reviewer. Also since 1993, he has held a halftime position at the University of Florida in Gainesville, USA, and in 1994, he was visiting associate professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has won nine literary awards, five for his translations. He has published more than thirty poetry translations. Some of his original publications: Nights in the Iron Hotel, 1983. Acrimony, 1986. Corona, Corona, 1993. Approximately Nowhere, 1999. Some of his poems: "1967-1971," "Ancient Evenings," "By Forced Marches," "First Night," "Myopia in Rupert Brooke Country," "Postcard from Cuernavaca," "The Austrians After Sadowa (1866)."

   Sources: Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems of Durs Grunbein. Michael Hofmann, translator. Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005. British Council Arts (http://www.contemporarywriters.com). Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times. Jo Shapcott and Matthew Sweeney, ed. Faber and Faber, 1996. Penguin Modern Poets, Book 9. John Burnside, Robert Crawford, and Kathleen Jamie, eds. Penguin Books, 1996. Some Contemporary Poets of Britain and Ireland: An Antholog y. Michael Schmidt, ed. Carcanet Press, 1983. The Chatto Book of Love Poetry. John Fuller, ed. Chatto and Windus, 1990. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems. Michael Hofmann, Faber and Faber, 2005. The Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Michael Schmidt, ed. The Harvill Press, 1999. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000.