MICHAEL KRÜGER, poet, novelist, and translator, was born in Wittgendorf, Germany in 1943. He served as editor and publisher of Hanser Verlag for 45 years until his retirement in 2013, the same year he was presented the Lifetime Achievement Award in International Publishing by the London Book Fair.


“Krüger is a poet of life-loving private grief and songs of impossibilities. He is a self-made oracle of various cultures. His poetry: magisterial potato farming. Krüger teaches us how to walk in the night, to have a destination we reach in darkness, to give ourselves finally over to the light in which we may or may not believe. He gives us a world exploding with memories, a flood, an Ark.”—Stanley Moss

“A well-disguised mystic…a scribe who has got beyond books, to the point where the wisdom of masters begins—the absurd wisdom which writes its final word on water. It would not be entirely wrong, either, to call Krüger a master of the love-poem, a first-rate painter of landscapes and climates, a reviver of the Roman Elegy, a painter’s poet. But he is all these things with a difference: there is a ‘remainder’ which—in rational terms—should not exist, which one will only discover if one is not looking for it and which is. . . everything.”—Adolf Muschg