Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium by Jürgen Becker, translated by Martyn Crucefix
Shearsman Books
Jürgen Becker (1932-2024) was born in Cologne, but moved eastwards with his family in 1939, to Thuringia, where he remained until 1947, when the family returned to the Western part of the country and then again to Cologne in 1950. From 1959 to 1964, Becker worked for WDR (West German Radio), and then moved on to become an editor at the Rowohlt publishing house in Hamburg. He went freelance in 1969, and became director of Suhrkamp's theatre publishing division in 1973, and head of the radio-drama department of Deutschlandfunk (German Radio). He became a member of the seminal 47 Group in 1960 and won the group's literary prize in 1967. He first became known as a poet in the 1960s, but of a very experimental kind, using open forms and eschewing traditional narrative. Nature and landscape played a prominent role in his work. Some of his poetry publications were accompanied by illustrations from his artist wife, Rango Bohne (1932-2021). As he became one of the most senior figures in German literature, his works received the country's major prizes: the Peter Huchel Prize, the Heinrich Böll prize, the Uwe Johnson Prize, the Günter Eich Prize, and the Georg Büchner Prize.
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