Background Info
Poet, translator, and essayist Michael Hofmann was born in Freiburg, Germany, and moved to the UK at age four. When his family returned to Germany, Hofmann stayed behind, first at boarding schools and later Magdalene College, Cambridge University, where he earned his BA and MA. His first book of poetry, Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983), earned him instant acclaim in Britain. Of his early work, written in verse blocks and purposefully flat tones, Hofmann has said, “If you open any book at any page, you'll see something wilfully perverse and devious. I think a big part of my writing poems at all is to make myself English; and that means not being straightforward." His second book, Acrimony (1986), won a Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Many of Hofmann’s poems detail his tumultuous relationship with his German father, the writer Gert Hofmann. Hofmann’s other collections of poetry include K.S. in Lakeland: New and Selected Poems (1990), Corona, Corona (1993), Approximately Nowhere (1999), Selected Poems (2009), and One Lark, One Horse (2019).
