Karen Leeder

Born in Derbyshire, she lived in Rugby and attended Rugby High School and Rugby School. She studied German at Magdalen College, Oxford and the University of Hamburg. She taught at Emmanuel College, Cambridge for three years from 1990 before taking up a post as a Fellow at New College, Oxford in 1993. Her interests include post-war German literature, the literature of the GDR, German poetry in translation, Brecht, Rilke, spectres and angels. She is an award-winning translator, and she has won prizes for her translations of Volker Braun, Evelyn Schlag, Durs Grünbein and Ulrike Almut Sandig. She has published widely on German culture, including several volumes on Rilke and Brecht. With Christopher Young and Michael Eskin, she is commissioning editor for the de Gruyter series of Companions to Contemporary German Culture. Her website Mediating Modern Poetry [1] documents some of her recent activities. She is married to philosopher and journalist Peter Thompson and has one daughter, Rosa.

Karen Leeder (1962) is a writer, translator and leading British scholar of German culture. She is professor of Modern German Literature in the University of Oxford and from 2016 to 2017 Associate Head of the Humanities Division, University of Oxford. In 2017 she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.