Michael Hulse was born in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire in 1955, and educated locally (1966-1971) and at the University of St Andrews (1973-1977), where he took an MA in German. From the late Seventies until very recently, he lived in Germany, working as a university lecturer, and as an editor, reviewer, translator and publisher.
Hulse’s poetry collections include Knowing and Forgetting (Secker and Warburg, London, 1981), Propaganda (Secker and Warburg, London 1985), and Eating Strawberries in the Necropolis (Collins Harvill, London, 1991). Empires and Holy Lands: Poems 1976-2000, appeared from Salt Publishing (Cambridge) in 2002.
Amongst the fifty or more books Hulse has translated into English are J.W. Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (Penguin, London, 1989), Jakob Wassermann’s Caspar Hauser (Penguin, London, 1992), Botho Strauss’s Tumult (Carcanet, Manchester/New York, 1984), and W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (Harvill, London/New Directions, New York, 1996), The Rings of Saturn (Harvill, London/New Directions, New York, 1998) and Vertigo (Harvill, London/New Directions, New York, 1999).
Hulse teaches on the Writing Programme at the University of Warwick.