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Marcel Beyer (born 1965 in Tailfingen, Germany) grew up in Kiel and Neuss and studied German, English and Literature at the University of Siegen. In 1992 he completed his degree with a paper on Friederike Mayröcker, whose collected prose and poetry he was later to edit. As a poet and novelist, Beyer is one of the most influential of contemporary German-speaking writers. His poetry is a polyphonic sounding-out of many different worlds of images and ideas in language that is always precise and at the same time playful. As well as his own poems and translations, Beyer has published several essays, an opera libretto and four critically-acclaimed novels, in which he deals with the body, language and music, and, increasingly, with historical and scientific topics. His current novel on the ornithologist Kaltenburg has been described on Deutschlandradio as a “stroke of good fortune for contemporary German literature”.
Among many other prizes and awards, Beyer received the 1997 Uwe Johnson Prize, the 2001 Heinrich Böll Prize, the 2003 Friedrich Hölderlin Prize of the City of Tübingen, the 2006 Erich Fried Prize and the 2008 Joseph Breitbach Prize. His novel Kaltenburg was long-listed for the 2008 German Book Prize.
Publications (selection):
Das Menschenfleisch, novel (Frankfurt am Main 1991)
Flughunde, novel (Frankfurt am Main 1995)
Falsches Futter, poems (Frankfurt am Main 1997)
Spione, novel (Cologne 2000)
Erdkunde, poems (Cologne 2002)
Nonfiction, essays (Cologne 2003)
Kaltenburg, novel (Frankfurt am Main 2008)
Arbeit Nahrung Wohnung. Stage Music for Fourteen Gentlemen, opera libretto (composer Enno Poppe) (2008)