Michael Krüger

Michael Krüger was born on 9 December 1943 in Wittgendorf (near Zeitz). After his secondary education in Berlin, he trained as a publisher’s bookseller and book printer, while sitting in on lectures at the Faculty of Letters of the Free University Berlin. From 1962 to 1965 he worked as a bookseller in London, and began working as a literary critic in 1966. Two years later, in 1968, he became an editor for the Carl Hanser publishing house, which he managed from 1986 to 2013. Since 1981, he has published and edited Akzente, an influential literary bimonthly. In 1972, Krüger published his own poems for the first time, with his debut as a fiction writer twelve years later with the book Was tun? Eine altmodische Geschichte (“What Should We Do? An Old-Fashioned Story”). A great number of stories, novels, edited works and translations have ensued. Among many other distinctions, Michael Krüger has been awarded the Eichendorff Prize for Literature (2017), the Joseph Breitbach Prize (2010), the Literature Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (2004), the Prix Médicis Étranger (1996) and the Peter Huchel Prize (1986).