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Public reading from the novel "Bei den Bieresch" with Klaus Hoffer (Brothers Grimm Poetry Professorship)
The Graz-based writer Klaus Hoffer (*1941) will take over the Brothers Grimm Poetry Professorship at the University of Kassel in 2018. With this visiting professorship, the Institute of German Studies honors outstanding writers, playwrights and filmmakers every year. The Austrian receives the award for his literary oeuvre.
Klaus Hoffer became known as a contemporary author through his two-part novel Bei den Bieresch (1979/83) and the story Am Magnetberg (1982). He has also published concrete-poetic and autoreflexive prose texts and essays as well as novel fragments for Unter Schweinen (1967/86) and Rutte (1985-89). His fictional texts have a complex narrative structure and are often densely interwoven. As a learned poet, poeta doctus, he knows how to deal with texts by other authors in a poetically as well as poetologically concise manner. His literary texts have already won several prizes, including the Alfred Döblin Prize, the Manuskripte Prize and the Rauris Literature Prize.
The Styrian studied German and English language and literature in Graz, with some excursions into art history and classical philology. Hoffer then completed his doctorate with a thesis on Franz Kafka. He has given poetry lectures in Mainz and Graz. He has lectured at numerous universities in and outside Europe, for example in the USA and Senegal. In addition, Klaus Hoffer was an active member of the writers' association 'Grazer Gruppe', to which Peter Handke also belonged. As a translator, Hoffer has also translated several classics of English-language literature - for example by Joseph Conrad, Raymond Carver and Kurt Vonnegut - into German.
More about the Brothers Grimm Poetry Professorship at: