Kirsten, Wulf

Wulf Kirsten, born in 1934 in Klipphausen near Meissen, scans stratifications of past and present in the landscape in his “disturbed pastoral”. Personal memories reflect the great movements of time. Kirsten’s poetry is always in search of the “true beauty of naked words”, as one of his poems puts it. Full of rarely heard vocabulary and quiet allusions to Hölderlin, Goethe, ETA Hoffmann, or Eichendorff, he writes a language “in which you can provision yourself against speed, adaptation, loss”, according to Martin Walser. In 1969 Kirsten took a special course at the Johannes R. Becher Institute of Literature and was an editor at Aufbau Verlag from 1965 to 1987. Since then he has lived as a freelance writer in Weimar. For his extensive literary work, he was awarded the Peter Huchel Prize in 1987, the Joseph Breitbach Prize in 2006 and the Thuringian Literature Prize in 2015, among others.