Karen Leeder (born 1962) [1] is a British writer, translator and scholar of German culture. [2] She is professor of Modern German Literature in the University of Oxford. [3] In 2021 she was elected as Schwarz-Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature, [4] a position she took up at The Queen's College, Oxford in 2022.
Born in Derbyshire, she lived in Rugby and attended Rugby High School and Rugby School. She studied German at Magdalen College, Oxford and the University of Hamburg.
She taught at Emmanuel College, Cambridge for three years as Official Fellow in German, from 1990 before taking up a post as a Fellow [5] at New College, Oxford in 1993. Her interests include post-war German literature, the literature of the GDR, German poetry in translation, Brecht, Rilke, spectres and angels.
From 1993 to 2022 she was Fellow in German at New College Oxford.[ citation needed ] In 2021 she was elected as Schwarz-Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature, [4] a position she took up at The Queen's College, Oxford in 2022. She is professor of Modern German Literature in the University of Oxford. [3] In 2023 she embarks on a three-year Einstein fellowship at the Free University of Berlin on the project AfterWords. [6]
In 2017 she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, [7] and in 2020 she was elected to the Academia Europaea. [8]
She is a translator, and she has won prizes for her translations of Volker Braun, Evelyn Schlag, Durs Grünbein and Ulrike Almut Sandig. [9] [ citation needed ] She has published widely on German culture, including several volumes on Rilke and Brecht. With Christopher Young and Michael Eskin, she was commissioning editor for the de Gruyter series of Companions to Contemporary German Culture (2012–2022).
Heiner Müller was a German dramatist, poet, writer, essayist and theatre director. His "enigmatic, fragmentary pieces" are a significant contribution to postmodern drama and postdramatic theatre.
Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian playwright and novelist. She is one of the most decorated authors to write in German and was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature for her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power". She is considered to be among the most important living playwrights of the German language.
Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet, translator, and critic. The Guardian has described him as "arguably the world's most influential translator of German into English".
Durs Grünbein is a German poet and essayist.
The Decision, frequently translated as The Measures Taken, is a Lehrstück and agitprop cantata by the twentieth-century German dramatist Bertolt Brecht. Created in collaboration with composer Hanns Eisler and director Slatan Dudow, it consists of eight sections in prose and unrhymed, free verse, with six major songs. A note to the text by all three collaborators describes it as an "attempt to use a didactic piece to make familiar an attitude of positive intervention."
Roger Cole Paulin is a scholar of German literature and culture. He was the Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge from 1989 until his retirement in 2005.
The Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize is an annual literary prize for any book-length translation into English from any other living European language. The first prize was awarded in 1999. The prize is funded by and named in honour of Lord Weidenfeld and by New College, The Queen's College and St Anne's College, Oxford.
The Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German Translation is a literary translation award given by the Society of Authors in London. Translations from the German original into English are considered for the prize. The value of the prize is £3,000, while the runner-up now receives £1,000. The prize is named for August Wilhelm Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck, who translated Shakespeare to German in the 19th century.
Krishna Winston is an American academic and translator of German literature. She is the daughter of translators Richard and Clara Winston. She obtained her BA at Smith College, followed by an MPhil and a doctorate from Yale University. She is currently the Marcus L. Taft Professor of German Language and Literature at Wesleyan University.
Ulrike Draesner is a German author. She was awarded the 2016 Nicolas Born Prize.
Lutz Seiler is a German poet and novelist.
Evelyn Schlag is an Austrian poet and novelist. She was born and raised in Waidhofen an der Ybbs and studied at the University of Vienna. She lived in Vienna for a few years before moving back to her native Waidhofen, where she continues to live today. Schlag has published more than a dozen books ranging from prose fiction to acclaimed poetry. She has also translated the work of the British poet Douglas Dunn into German.
Robert Vilain is a British literary scholar. He has been Fellow and Senior Tutor of St Hugh's College, Oxford, since September 2021. Previously he was Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Bristol, where he still holds an Honorary Professorship, and Director of the AHRC-funded South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership, a consortium of nine universities and National Museum Wales dedicated to funding and training PhD students. He is also Lecturer in German at Christ Church, Oxford, and responsible for the College's teaching in German.
Susan Bernofsky is an American translator of German-language literature and author. She is best known for bringing the Swiss writer Robert Walser to the attention of the English-speaking world, translating many of his books and writing his biography. She has also translated several books by Jenny Erpenbeck and Yoko Tawada. Her prizes for translation include the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, the 2012 Calw Hermann Hesse Prize, the 2015 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the 2015 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. She was also selected for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. In 2017 she won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for her translation of Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada. In 2018 she was awarded the MLA's Lois Roth Award for her translation of Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck. In 2024, Bernofsky was reported to be working on a translation of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.
Joel Agee is an American writer and translator. He lives in New York.
The Lessing Prize of the Free State of Saxony is a German literary award. It was founded in 1993 by the Government of the Free State of Saxony and is awarded every two years. It consists of a main prize, which honours outstanding achievements in the spirit of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, especially in the field of literature, literary criticism and the theater. This prize is worth 20,000 euros. In addition, two further "promotional prizes" are awarded, which seek to publicly recognize and promote promising beginnings in these fields. These prizes are each worth 5,500 euros.
Ulrike Almut Sandig is a German writer. She was born in Großenhain in the former GDR, and has lived in Riesa, Leipzig and Berlin. She studied religious studies and indology at university, and then studied at the German Institute for Literature in Leipzig.
Teresa D. Lewis is an American translator, writer, and essayist. She is best known for her translation of French author Christine Angot's novel, Incest which was nominated for the Best Translated Book Award and her translation of Austrian poet and novelist Maja Haderlap's novel Angel of Oblivion, which was awarded the 2017 PEN Translation Prize, the Austrian Cultural Forum NY Translation Prize, and was nominated for the BTBA. She has also translated works by Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, and Philippe Jaccottet. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and received the Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford, New College, in 1986. Website: www.tesslewis.org
Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of My City is a poetry collection by the German writer Durs Grünbein. It consists of 49 poems about the city of Dresden, lamenting its developments and destruction in February 1945 when the Allies of World War II subjected it to heavy aerial bombardment.
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