Ludwig Steinherr Germany

Ludwig Steinherr was born in Munich in 1962, where he still lives, and studied philosophy at the University of Munich (writing an M.A. thesis on Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik and a much-noted doctorate on Hegel and Quine, "Holismus, Existenz und Identität". Ein systematischer Vergleich zwischen Quine und Hegel). He is now a free-lance writer and lecturer in philosophy at the University of Eichstätt. Steinherr has worked as an essayist, a reviewer, a juror, a translator (of Michael Hamburger, among others), and as an editor, co-founding the influential journal Das Gedicht with Anton G. Leitner in 1993. But it is as a poet that he has written his way into the front rank of contemporary German writers, one milestone here being the selection of his poem 'Sage' (Legend) as 'Gedicht des Jahres' (Poem of the Year) by the Autoren-initiative Köln in 1987. The present volume has been selected from his first ten collections, beginning with his 1985 debut volume, Fluganweisung (Flight Instructions), up to Die Hand im Feuer (The Hand in the Fire), 2005; since then he has published two further poetry collections, Von Stirn zu Gestirn (From Brow to Constellation) in 2007 and Kometenjagd (Hunting for Comets) in 2009.

Steinherr's poems have also been published widely in magazines and anthologies in Germany and abroad - in Raymond Hargreaves' Young Poets of Germany (Forest Books, 1994), for instance, and in the 1994 Agenda German Issue, edited by Michael Hamburger and Richard Dove - and have received a number of awards, including the Leonce-und-Lena-Förderpreis (1993), the Buchpreis des Verbandes Evangelischer Büchereien (1999) and the Hermann-Hesse-Förderpreis (1999). They have also been translated into various languages, including French and Czech.

Steinherr was elected a fellow of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste (Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts) in 2003.

(2010)