Variations on No Theme

Durs Grünbein was born in Dresden and now lives in Berlin and Rome. Since 2005, he has been a professor of poetics and aesthetics at the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf. His work, which includes books of poetry, essays, translations, and libretti, has won many awards, including the Georg Büchner Prize and the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published a book of his selected poems, Ashes for Breakfast, in 2005.

Michael Hofmann's 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.