Michael Hofmann was born in Freiburg in 1957, the son of the German novelist Gert Hofmann. He grew up in England, went to Cambridge, and has had a career as a poet and reviewer, publishing 6 books of poems with Faber & Faber, and scores of translations from the German, including books by Joseph Roth and Wolfgang Koeppen. Castle Gripsholm (1985) was his first published translation, and was republished in the prestigious NYRB Classics series in 2019.

In 2024, Michael Hofmann shared the International Booker Prize with Jenny Erpenbeck for Kairos. His latest collection of poems will appear in German translation by Marcel Beyer and Jan Wagner as Pferd und Lerche from Hanser later this year. His awards for translation include the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (four times), and the American Academy’s Thornton Wilder Prize in Translation.