Hans Magnus Enzensberger is Germany's most important poet, as well as a provocative cultural essayist, a highly influential editor and one of Europe's leading political thinkers. His poetry's social and moral criticism of the post-war world owes much to Marxism, yet insists on the freedoms often denied by Communist governments; like Orwell he maintains that satire and criticism should not be party-political. Born in 1929, he grew up in Nazi Nuremberg. He studied in Germany and France, and in Freiburg under Martin Heidegger. He was a founder member of Group 47, a loose grouping of disaffected German intellectuals including Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass, generally viewed as the most influential movement after the war. His introduction to English readers came with a Penguin Selected Poems in 1968. His much larger, bilingual Bloodaxe Selected Poems of 1994 covered collections published over 30 years, up to Music of the Future (1991), including The Sinking of the Titanic. These were followed by two later collections, published in English translation by Bloodaxe, Kiosk (1995/1997) and Lighter than Air: moral poems (1999/2002). In Germany he recently published Die Elixiere der Wissenschaft (The Elixirs of Science, 2002), a gathering of his poetry and prose relating to science, followed by collection of 99 meditations, Die Geschichte der Wolken (2003), published in English by Seagull Books as A History of Clouds (2010). His bilingual New Selected Poems was published by Bloodaxe in 2015.
David Constantine lectured in German at Durham from 1969 to 1981 and at Oxford from 1981 to 2000. He was co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2004 to 2013. He was named winner of The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry for 2020, and presented with the award by HM the Queen in 2021. He has published eleven books of poetry, six translations and a novel with Bloodaxe. His poetry titles include Collected Poems (2004), which is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Nine Fathom Deep (2009); Elder (2014); and Belongings (2020). His Bloodaxe translations include editions of Henri Michaux and Philippe Jaccottet; his Selected Poems of Hölderlin, winner of the European Poetry Translation Prize, and his version of Hölderlin’s Sophocles, combined in his new expanded Hölderlin edition, Selected Poetry (2018); and his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Lighter Than Air, winner of the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. His translation, A Bird Called Elaeus: poems for here and now from The Greek Anthology, is published by Bloodaxe in 2024. Other books include his translation of Goethe’s Faust in Penguin Classics (2005, 2009) and his co-translation (with Tom Kuhn) of The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht (W.W. Norton, 2018). He has published six collections of short stories, and won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2013 for his collection Tea at the Midland (Comma Press). Four other short story collections are published by Comma Press. His story 'In Another Country' was adapted into 45 Years, a major film starring Tom Courtney and Charlotte Rampling.
