Michael Hofmann

An Extended Passport Application

For more than four decades, Michael Hofmann has made significant contributions to the literary cultures of Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, ranging from his original poetry to translations of Kafka, Brecht, Hans Fallada, and Joseph Roth, among others. In the first book-length study of this iconic figure, poet and translator Andr Naffis-Sahely surveys Hofmann’s life and work with an emphasis on his poetry, situating him within the “New Generation” of writers, including Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, and Don Paterson, who rose to prominence in Britain between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s.

Reaffirming Hofmann’s central place in contemporary literature, Naffis-Sahely presents the author’s oeuvre as an “extended passport application,” as the poet’s unusually peripatetic nature emerges as a poetic means of questioning various modes of authority. Naffis-Sahely examines Hofman