Department of English

Michael Hofmann writes, reviews, translates, and teaches. He has edited the anthology Twentieth Century German Poetry (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), and made personal selections from the work of Robert Lowell, John Berryman, W.S. Graham, and Malcolm Lowry. He has translated some hundred titles from the German, by Joseph Roth, Franz Kafka, Alfred Döblin, Hans Fallada, Irmgard Keun, Wolfgang Koeppen, Peter Stamm, Jenny Erpenbeck, and many others. His Selected Poems came out in 2009, One Lark, One Horse in 2018 (both FSG).

Hofmann publishes reviews and essays in the London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, and the Australian Book Review. His pieces have been collected in two books called Behind the Lines and Where Have You Been? (both FSG), and in his 2020 Clarendon Lectures, Messing About in Boats (OUP). He teaches graduate and undergraduate poetry workshops and offers an undergraduate course in Creative Non-Fiction.