Michael Hofmann is a poet, reviewer and translator.
He has published four books of poems, and Behind the Lines: Pieces on Writing and Pictures. His collection of essays, Where Have You Been? was published by Faber & Faber in February 2015. He has made selections of the poetry of Robert Lowell and John Berryman, and, with James Lasdun, co-edited the influential anthology After Ovid. Hofmann has translated many German authors, including Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth and Hans Fallada. His translation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Other Stories is published by Penguin, and he is now at work on a new translation of Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. A hitherto untranslated novel by Fallada, A Small Circus, was published in January 2012. Michael lives in London and Germany, and since 1993 has held a half-time teaching position at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
Michael’s recent translations include Kafka’s The Burrow (Penguin, 2017), and he is currently translating Fallada’s Little Man, What Now? (Kleiner Mann, Was Nun?) for Penguin.
In 2016, Faber re-issued Michael’s poetry collections Nights in the Iron Hotel, Acrimony, Corona and Approximately Nowhere. His new poetry collection, One Lark, One Horse, was published by Faber in 2018.
Michael Hofmann was a judge for the International Booker Prize in 2018.
