Michael Hofmann


Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet, translator, and critic. The Guardian has described him as "arguably the world's most influential translator of German into English".

Biography

Michael Hofmann was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, the son of German novelist Gert Hofmann and his wife Eva Hofmann, a teacher. He grew up in a family with a literary tradition. His maternal grandfather edited the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie. 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 at Magdalene College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA in 1979. For the next four years, he pursued postgraduate study at the University of Regensburg and Trinity College, Cambridge.
In 1983, Hofmann started working as a freelance writer, translator, and literary critic.
He has since gone on to hold visiting professorships at the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, the New School University, Barnard College, and Columbia University. He was first a visitor to the University of Florida in 1990, joined the faculty in 1994, and became full-time in 2009. He has been teaching poetry and translation workshops.
In 2008, Hofmann was Poet-in-Residence in the state of Queensland in Australia.
Hofmann has two sons, Max and Jakob. He splits his time between Hamburg and Gainesville, Florida.

Honours

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 Der Kontrabaß. 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 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 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. 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 runner-up for the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for his translation of Gert 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.
Hoffman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.
His translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's novel Kairos won them the International Booker Prize in 2024, the first occasion on which the prize was won by either a German writer or a male translator.

Critical writing

describes Hofmann's review writing as "masterful" and "convention-eviscerating". Philip Oltermann remarks on the "savagery" with which Hofmann "can wield a hatchet", stating that: "Like a Soho drunk stumbling into the National Portrait Gallery in search of a good scrap, Hofmann has battered posthumous reputations with the same glee as those of the living."

Selected bibliography

Author

  • Translator

  • Koeppen, Wolfgang (2003. A Sad Affair. Norton.

  • Editor

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