Michael Hofmann was born in 1957 in Freiburg, Germany, and came to England in 1961.

He has published four volumes of poems and won a Cholmondeley Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for poetry. His translations have won many awards, including the Independent’s Foreign Fiction Award, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize.

His reviews and criticism are gathered in Behind the Lines.