Ulrike Draesner is recognised as one of Germany's most important living poets, as well as being an original and daring writer of fiction.
Her poetic language, recorded where breath and script meet, can unsettle conventional reading modalities: its orthography refuses to capitalize; its punctuation - if the stops and starts may be called that - is rarely executed by comma or period; its sequentialities, shunning the comfort of bespoke narrative, undermining the reliability of marching lines and subaltern clauses, are born at the intersection of worldly impulse and bodily pulse, vulnerable to the loops of memory. Her writing favours an exchange with the reader that explores unfamiliar modes of encountering the world to form the sociable space of a poem. Her work is charged with a delicious, inquisitive restlessness. Visually acute, her poems are keen to discover, reflect on and body forth complex blendings of thought, sound, smell and image, delivering a revealing diffraction to the reader's ear.
Draesner, Ulrike: - Ulrike Draesner was born in Munich in 1962. She studied English Literature, Philosophy and German Literature in Munich, where she completed a Ph.D. on the medieval romance Parzival in 1992, and at Oxford, where she returned as a visiting fellow from 2015-17. She is one of the most distinguished poets writing in German today, and has also translated work by, among others, Gertrude Stein, Michèle Métail and H.D., as well as Louise Glück's volumes Averno (2007) and Wild Iris (2008). Draesner's eight volumes of poetry include her debut gedächtnis-schleifen (memory loops, 1995) as well as für die nacht geheuerte zellen (cells hired for the night, 2001), kugelblitz (ball lightning, 2005), subsong (subsong, 2014) and her long poem doggerland (2021). She has written seven novels, the most recent of which are Sieben Sprünge vom Rand der Welt (Seven Leaps from the Edge of the World, 2014), which was shortlisted for the German Book Prize and in which a chorus of characters tell of forced migration in Middle and Eastern Europe between 1939 and the present day, Kanalschwimmer (Channel Swimmer, 2019), and Schwitters (2020), which follows the artist Kurt Schwitters into exile (1937-1948) from Hanover via Norway and London until his death in the Lake District. She has also published three books of stories and five volumes of essays and lectures. Among many other awards for her poetry and fiction, she received the Grand Prize of the German Literary Fund in 2021 for her life's work. She lives in Berlin and Leipzig, where she is a professor of Creative Writing at the German Literature Institute.
Galbraith, Iain: - Iain Galbraith, born in 1956 in the West of Scotland, studied German, French and Comparative Literature in Cambridge, Freiburg and Mainz, where he taught English for ten years. His recent publications include a volume of poems, The True Height of the Ear (Arc, 2018), as well as translations of W.G. Sebald's Across the Land and the Water. Selected Poems (Penguin, 2012), Esther Dischereit's Sometimes a Single Leaf. Selected Poems (Arc, 2020) and Reinhard Jirgl's novel The Unfinished (Seagull, 2020). He has edited five anthologies of poetry and is also a translator into German, including plays by Enda Walsh and Che Walker and volumes of poetry by Alice Oswald and John Burnside. Since 2019 he has contributed monthly essays to the online platform openDemocracy on subjects as diverse as data centres, Edgar Reitz's film series Heimat, and personal poultry in London's City. He has won a number of prizes for his work, including the Stephen Spender Prize (2014), the Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation (2015), the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 2016 for his translation of Jan Wagner's Self-portrait with a Swarm of Bees. Selected Poems (Arc) and again in 2019 for a translation of Esther Kinsky's novel River (Fitzcarraldo). He lives in Wiesbaden, Germany.
