Ulrike Draesner Author & Translator

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.