Michael Hofmann

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 Suskind, Herta Mueller and Franz Kafka. He has twice won the Translators' Association's Schlegel-Tieck Prize. His published poetry includes Nights In The Iron Hotel, which won the Cholmondeley Award; Acrimony; Corona, Corona and Approximately Nowhere.

Michael Hofmann is married to the poet Lavinia Greenlaw and lives in London