Klaus Hoffer

The Graz-based writer Klaus Hoffer will assume the Brothers Grimm Poetics Professorship at the University of Kassel in 2018. The Austrian receives the honor for his award-winning literary work. With the Kassel Grimm Poetics Professorship, the Institute for German Studies at the university in northern Hesse annually honors outstanding literary figures as well as playwrights and film people.

The author became known through texts such as the two-part novel Bei den Bieresch (1979/83), the story Am Magnetberg (1982) and novel fragments, concrete-poetic as well as intertextually charged prose texts and essays. 

Hoffer was a member of the so-called 'Graz Group', a loose association of writers based in Graz, which also included other well-known writers such as Peter Handke.
"Klaus Hoffer is an excellent choice for the professorship," says Prof. Dr. Stefanie Kreuzer from the Institute for German Studies at the University of Kassel. "He is a great writer who is admired by other authors, even though - as Urs Widmer once pointed out - he had runs like Kafka when the latter was still riding a motorcycle and laughing," judges the literature and media scholar, who herself received her doctorate with a thesis on Klaus Hoffer's work in the context of fantasy and postmodernism.

The Styrian studied German and English language and literature with some excursions into art history and classical philology in Graz. He then earned his doctorate with a thesis on Kafka. "Hoffer is a true poeta doctus, a learned poet," Kreuzer says. "His fictional texts are narratively complex in structure and often densely interwoven intertextually. At the same time, he also knows how to engage poetically with texts by other authors in a concise way."