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Michael Hofmann (born 25 August 1957) is a German-born poet, translator, and critic. The Guardian has described him as "arguably the world's most influential translator of German into English".
In 1983, Hofmann started working as a freelancer writer, translator, and literary critic. He has since gone on to hold visiting professorships at the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, the New School University, Barnard College, and Columbia University. He was first a visitor to the University of Florida in 1990, joined the faculty in 1994, and became full-time in 2009. He has been teaching poetry and translation workshops. Michael Hofmann University of Florida, Department of English Faculty. Retrieved 16 January 2018
In 2008, Hofmann was Poet-in-Residence in the state of Queensland in Australia.
Hofmann has two sons, Max (1991) and Jakob (1993). He splits his time between Hamburg and Gainesville, Florida.
Hofmann was awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 1995 for the translation of his father's novel The Film Explainer, and nominated again in 2003 for his translation of Peter Stephan Jungk's The Snowflake Constant. In 1997 he received the Arts Council Writer's Award for his collection of poems Approximately Nowhere, and the following year he received the International Dublin Literary Award for his translation of Herta Müller's novel The Land of Green Plums.
In 1999, Hofmann was awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for his translation of Joseph Roth's The String of Pearls. In 2000, Hofmann was selected as the recipient of the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his translation of Joseph Roth's novel Rebellion ( Die Rebellion). In 2003 he received another Schlegel-Tieck Prize for his translation of his father's Luck, and in 2004 he was awarded the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for his translation of Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel. In 2005 Hofmann received his fourth Schlegel-Tieck Prize for his translation of Gerd Ledig's The Stalin Organ. Hofmann served as a judge for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002, and in 2006 Hofmann made the Griffin's international shortlist for his translation of Durs Grünbein's Ashes for Breakfast.
Hoffman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.
His translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's novel Kairos won them the International Booker Prize in 2024, the first occasion on which the prize was won by either a German writer or a male translator.
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