Biografisk notat

Evelyn Schlag (born 1952) grew up in Waidhofen an der Ybbs in Lower Austria. She studied German and English at the University of Vienna before becoming a teacher in Vienna and, later, in her home town of Waidhofen. She has published a wide range of poetry, prose and short stories since 1981 as well as translations (notably of Douglas Dunn) and essays. An English-language Selected Poems, translated by Karen Leeder, was published by Carcanet in 2004, and an English translation of her novel Die Kränkung (Quotations of a Body), translated by Willy Riemer, appeared in 1998. Schlag’s works have been greeted with much critical acclaim, and she has received many awards, including the 1988 Bremer Förderpreis, the 1997 Anton Wildgans Prize, and the Otto Stoessl Prize in 1998. She was Lecturer for Poetry at the Institut für Sprachkunst (2010/2011) and a Member of the Judging Panel for Dublin’s IMPAC Prize 2012. In 2012 she was selected to represent Austria in the Poetry Parnassus (held at the Southbank Centre, London). She is a member of the Graz Literary Academy. She was awarded the Austrian Art Prize for Literature in 2015 and was award a Hay Festival Medal for Poetry in 2018. Karen Leeder (born 1962) is a writer, translator and academic. Since 1993 she has taught German at New College, Oxford and is Professor of Modern German Literature there. She is also a translator of German poetry into English, most recently Volker Braun, Rubble Flora: Selected Poems (with David Constantine, 2014), Michael Krüger, Last Day of the Year: Selected Poems (2014) and Ulrike Almut Sandig, Thick of It (2018). Her translation of Evelyn Schlag’s Selected Poems (2004) won the Schlegel Tieck Prize in 2005 and she won the Stephen Spender Prize in 2013 for her translation of Durs Grünbein.