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Public reading from the novel "Bei den Bieresch" with Klaus Hoffer (Brothers Grimm Poetics Professorship)
The Graz-based writer Klaus Hoffer (* 1941) will assume the Brothers Grimm Poetics Professorship at the University of Kassel in 2018. With this guest professorship, the Institute for German Studies annually honors outstanding literary, dramatic and film artists. The Austrian receives the honor 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 autoreflexively charged prose texts and essays as well as novel fragments on Unter Schweinen (1967/86) and Rutte (1985-89). His fictional texts are narratively complex in structure and often densely interwoven intertextually. As a learned poet, poeta doctus, he knows how to deal with texts by other authors in a poetically as well as poetologically incisive way. His literary texts have already won several prizes, including the Alfred Döblin Prize, the Manuscripts Prize and the Rauris Literature Prize.
Hoffer, who comes from Styria, studied German and English language and literature with some excursions into art history and classical philology in Graz. Hoffer subsequently received his doctorate with a thesis on Franz Kafka. He has lectured on poetics in Mainz and Graz. He has lectured at numerous universities in and outside Europe, for example in the USA and Senegal. Furthermore, Klaus Hoffer was active as a 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 - such as those by Joseph Conrad, Raymond Carver and Kurt Vonnegut - into German.
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