25/09/2026
Just one month to go until in San Francisco! We’re delighted to welcome Michael Hofmann as the German Language Division’s Distinguished Speaker. Michael will present two sessions at the conference, taking place October 28–31. We hope to see you there!
Michael Hofmann is a poet, translator, critic, and essayist whose acclaimed translations have brought some of the most important German-language writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to English-language readers. He has translated more than 70 books from German, including works by Joseph Roth, Franz Kafka, Alfred Döblin, Hans Fallada, Irmgard Keun, Wolfgang Koeppen, Peter Stamm, and Jenny Erpenbeck.
In 2024, Hofmann was awarded the International Booker Prize for his translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos. His many other honors for translation include the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize, which he has received four times. He has also received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Thornton Wilder Prize in Translation.
Born in Freiburg, Germany, Hofmann moved to the United Kingdom as a child and studied at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is also an acclaimed poet whose collections include Nights in the Iron Hotel, Acrimony, Selected Poems, and One Lark, One Horse. He edited Twentieth Century German Poetry and has published two collections of essays, Behind the Lines and Where Have You Been?
Hofmann’s reviews and essays have appeared in publications including the London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, and Australian Book Review. He teaches poetry and creative writing at the University of Florida.