Jürgen Becker: 90th Birthday on July 10, 2022

On July 10, 2022, Jürgen Becker will celebrate his 90th birthday. Becker was born in Cologne in 1932. After abandoning his studies at university, he began working as a freelance writer and for years he made his living with various jobs. He worked for the broadcasting station WDR and for the publishing houses Rowohlt and Suhrkamp. He was head of the radio drama department of Deutschlandfunk for twenty years, until 1993.

Jürgen Becker received great attention with his first work of prose, Felder (1964), while the two subsequent books Ränder (1968) and Umgebungen (1970) consolidated his reputation as an author of experimental literature. At the same time, he contributed to the emergence of the New Radio Play with his first radio plays. In the 1970s and 1980s, Jürgen Becker focused his attention on poetry.

Jürgen Becker’s work has been awarded numerous prizes. He is a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin-Brandenburg, the German Academy for Language and Poetry, the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature, and the PEN Club. In 2014, Becker was honoured with Germany’s most prestigious literary award, the Georg Büchner Prize as a »leading voice of contemporary poetry«. His accolades also include the Günter-Eich-Preis (2013), the Uwe-Johnson-Preis (2001), the Heinrich-Böll-Preis (1995), the Peter-Huchel-Preis (1994), the Deutscher Kritikerpreis (1980) and the Preis der Gruppe 47 (1967).

Suhrkamp Verlag most recently published his new collection of journal poems, The Return of Habits, as well as the Collected Poems 1971-2022.

»Becker’s poetry forms a kaleidoscope of the fleetingness we live every day.«
Hans-Dieter Schütt, neues deutschland