Author and translator Michael Hofmann in New Zealand

Rutherford House, Lecture Theatre 2, Victoria University (Pipitea Campus Wellington), 9 August 2012, 6pm free entry

The New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation in association with the Goethe-Institut and the International Institute of Modern Letters invite you to the 2012 Annual Lecture in Literary Translation "Six or Seven Beginnings" by Michael Hofmann, award-winning poet, translator and critic. Earlier this year he was awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Michael Hofmann was born in 1957 in Freiburg (Germany), but grew up in England and attended schools in Edinburgh and Winchester. He studied English Literature and Classics at the universities of Oxford, Regensburg (Germany), Trinity College Dublin, and Cambridge. Since 1983 he has been working as a freelance translator, author and literary critic.

In addition to book reviews, he has published several volumes of poetry. He has translated a large number of novels including works by Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka and Herta Müller. Recently published translations include Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin (2009) and Günter Eich’s poetry collection Angina Days (2010).

In 1995 he received the Independent newspaper’s Foreign Fiction Prize for the translation of the novel The Film Explainer by Gert Hofmann (his father). Other awards include the Schlegel-Tieck prize for his translations of Patrick Süskind’s The Double Bass (1988) and the Weidenfeld Oxford Translation Prize for Durs Grünbein’s Ashes for Breakfast. Michael Hofmann is Professor of English Literature at the University of Florida.