Klaus Hoffer

The Graz-based writer Klaus Hoffer will take over the Brothers Grimm Poetry Professorship at the University of Kassel in 2018. The Austrian receives the award for his multi-award-winning literary work. With the Kassel Grimm Poetry Professorship, the Institute of German Studies at the university in North Hesse honors outstanding writers as well as playwrights and filmmakers every year.

The author became known for texts such as the two-part novel Bei den Bieresch (1979/83), the story Am Magnetberg (1982) and novel fragments, concrete-poetic and 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 of 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 editions like Kafka when he was still riding his motorcycle and laughing," says the literature and media scholar, who herself completed her doctorate with a thesis on Klaus Hoffer's work in the context of fantasy and postmodernism.

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