Michael Hofmann was born in Freiburg, Germany in 1957, and came to England in 1961. He has won a Cholmondeley Award and the Geoffrey faber memorial prize for his poetry. He co-edited After Ovid with James Lasdun, and has published numerous prize-winning translations from the German, including works by Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Roth, Patrick Suskind, Franz Kafka, Thomas Bernhard and Durs Grunbein. In 2005, he edited the Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems. He teaches for part of the year at the University of Florida, Gainesville.