Michael Krüger
Motivation
What does it mean being a writer? If we were unable to answer such a radical question we could invent Michael Krüger, but even that would not be easy, because Michael has always so many things to say, things about life and History; by reading what he writes we discover that these are also our own feelings and thoughts, but we need him to discover them in his articles, in his novels and short stories, in his poems to make them our own and to discover that he is the one who brings them out of us and that, after reading him, we have become a little more ourselves.
Biography
Michael Krüger, poet and novelist, was born in 1943 in Wittgendorf in Saxony-Anhalt, grew up in Berlin and lives in Munich. For many years he was the soul of Carl Hanser Verlag one of the most prestigious German publishing houses. He started working as a reader for the Munich publisher in 1968, and in 1986 he became its literary director, a position he recently left after a brilliant career that led him to include in his catalogue fourteen Nobel Prize-winning writers, including Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott and Tomas Tranströmer.
He was the editor of the magazine “Akzente” as well as of Edition Akzente. He is a member of several
academies, president of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, and the author of several volumes of poetry,
short stories, novels, and translations. A refined intellectual, Krüger has more than forty books to his credit, ranging from poetry, short stories, novels, literary criticism, and translations, including that of the poems of Cesare Pavese. His first volume of stories Was tun – one altmodische History (What shall we do – an old- fashioned story) was published in 1984. For his literary work, Krüger has published nearly two dozen books with poems, novels and stories, and has received many awards including the Peter-Huchel-Preis (1986), the Médicis Etrangers Prize in 1996 the Mörike-Preis (2006), the Joseph- Breitbach-Preis (2010) and the Cesare De Michelis Prize for publishing in 2023.
He was the editor of the magazine “Akzente” as well as of Edition Akzente. He is a member of several
academies, president of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, and the author of several volumes of poetry,
short stories, novels, and translations. A refined intellectual, Krüger has more than forty books to his credit, ranging from poetry, short stories, novels, literary criticism, and translations, including that of the poems of Cesare Pavese. His first volume of stories Was tun – one altmodische History (What shall we do – an old- fashioned story) was published in 1984. For his literary work, Krüger has published nearly two dozen books with poems, novels and stories, and has received many awards including the Peter-Huchel-Preis (1986), the Médicis Etrangers Prize in 1996 the Mörike-Preis (2006), the Joseph- Breitbach-Preis (2010) and the Cesare De Michelis Prize for publishing in 2023.