Durs Grünbein: 60th Birthday on October 9, 2022

On October 9, 2022, author and poet Durs Grünbein celebrates his 60th birthday. Born in Dresden in 1962, he read theatre studies in Berlin, after which he worked as a freelancer writing for various literary magazines. He is one of the most important and internationally influential German poets and essayists and the recipient of numerous prestigious literary prizes.

Grünbein's debut volume of poetry published in 1988 was entitled Grauzone morgens and he went on to publish nearly twenty collections of poetry including Vom Schnee oder Descartes in Deutschland (2003), Der Misanthrop auf Capri (2005), Porzellan. Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt (2005), Zündkerzen (2017) and, most recently, Äquidistanz (July 2022). He is also the author of a collection of essays, the Oxford Lectures Jenseits der Literatur (2020), and opera librettos. He has translated the tragedies of Aeschylus and Seneca into German as well as the works of contemporary authors such as Sara Kane, Ted Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Samuel Beckett, John Ashbery and Tomas Venclova.
For his work, he has received numerous renowned national and international awards, including the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award 2020 (Poland), the Premio Internazionale di Poesia 2019 (Italy), the European Poet of Freedom Award 2012 (Poland), the Tomas Tränströmer Prize 2012 (Sweden), the Samuel Bogumił Linde Prize (together with Adam Zagajewski) 2009 (Poland), the Premio Internazionale Pier Paolo Pasolini 2006 (Italy), the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize 2005 (Germany), the Georg Büchner Prize 1995 (Germany) and the Peter Huchel Prize 1995 (Germany). 

»Grünbein is presently one of the most famous and appreciated German language poets, not only because of the value of his enormous creative output, but also because of the scope of his interests and the initiatives he has undertaken over the years. Born in the former GDR, he describes the experiences of the grey days of the ›People’s Democracy‹, the grey streets of a war-torn Dresden reduced to ashes, but also the colourful chaos and ambiguity of the present. His poems, a mix of various styles of expression, from the most metaphorical to the colloquial and striking, with their ruthless directness, often take on boldly modernized, though fundamentally classic, literary forms: elegy, ode, sonnet, epic poem, prose poem. Grünbein, whilst staying close to modern life, comes into contact with art and philosophy, as if he had as examples the German language’s great predecessors: Hölderlin, Novalis, and Goethe. His poems are dialogues with the great: Seneca, Pascal, and Descartes. He constantly subjects existence to the scrutiny of poetic analysis, re-erecting a once destroyed bridge, linking poetry and philosophy; best seen in the widely commented lengthy poem about Descartes, which in itself is something of a mechanism, a kind of poetic machine serving reflection. In this sense, Grünbein is also close to Zbigniew Herbert’s poetic tradition: universal culture is still a reference for him, a place where we all live, despite the passage of the years, changes in fashions and ways of communicating. It is also an inexhaustible store of questions that are still worth asking, a way of finding kinship in the face of a restless present. An element of permanence, something that, for a moment, allows us to forget about the time and space that divide us.«
—Tomasz Różycki, poet and prose writer, juror of the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award