Jan Wagner was born 1971 in Hamburg and has been living in Berlin since 1995. Poet, essayist, translator of Anglo-American poetry (Charles Simic, James Tate, Simon Armitage, Jo Shapcott, Sujata Bhatt, Matthew Sweeney, Robin Robertson and many others), he has published seven poetry collections since 2001, most recently Die Live Butterfly Show (2018). Regentonnenvariationen (“Rain Barrel Variations”), his sixth collection, won the Award of the Leipzig Bookfair in 2015; a Selected Poems 2001-2015 was published by Hanser Verlag in Spring 2016. Wagner’s poetry has been translated into forty languages. A selection in English (Self-Portrait With a Swarm of Bees: Selected Poems, translated by Iain Galbraith) was published in 2015 by Arc, UK; another English selection, translated by David Keplinger, came out in 2017 with Milkweed Editions, USA, under the title The Art of Topiary: Selected Poems. Wagner has received various scholarships and awards, among them the Anna Seghers Award(2004), the Friedrich Hölderlin Award(2011), the Zhongkun International Poetry Prize (China, 2017), the Georg Büchner Prize(2017) and the Prix Max Jacob (France, 2020). He is a member of the German Academy of Language and Literature.
