Durs Grünbein was born in Dresden in 1962 and lives in Berlin and Rome. After the decline of the Soviet Empire he travelled in Europe, South Asia and the United States. Since 2005 he has been Professor of Poetics and Aesthetics at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Since 2009 he has been a member of the Pour le Mérite Order for Science and Arts in Germany. He has published fifteen collections of poetry, a diary, a memoir and four books of essays. He has also translated works by John Ashbery, Samuel Beckett, Henri Michaux and Wallace Stevens, and classic texts by Aeschylus, Juvenal and Seneca. He has received many literary prizes, including the 1995 Georg Büchner Prize, the 2004 Nietzsche Prize, the 2005 Hölderlin Prize, Italy’s 2006 Pier Paolo Pasolini Prize and Sweden’s 2012 Tranströmer Prize. His poetry has been translated into English by Michael Hofmann (Ashes for Breakfast, Faber) and Michael Eskin (Mortal Diamond, Upper Westside Philosophers, Inc.), and also into many other languages.