Michael Hofmann was born in Freiburg in 1957, the son of the German writer Gert Hofmann. He has lived in England since 1961. He studied English at Cambridge and was for 10 years a freelance writer and reviewer in London. At present, he is Professor of English at the University of Florida.

His poems, reviews, and essays have been published in The Guardian, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, New York Times, Poetry, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. He is the author of two collections of critical writing (Behind the Lines (2001) and Where Have You Been? (2014)) and six books of poems (most recently, One Lark, One Horse, 2018). He has edited selections of John Berryman, W.S. Graham, Robert Lowell, and Malcolm Lowry.

He has translated some 80 books from German, by authors including Gottfried Benn, Hans Fallada, Joseph Roth, Franz Kafka and Alfred Döblin. He won the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation in 2012 and the International Booker Prize in 2024 (with its author, Jenny Erpenbeck) for Kairos.

Top Titles

• Where Have You Been? (2014)
• One Lark, One Horse (2018)
• Kairos (Jenny Erpenbeck, 2023). Translated by Michael Hofmann