Karen Leeder

Karen Leeder is a writer, translator and Schwarz-Taylor Chair of German Language Literature at the University of Oxford. She especially translates German-language poetry, including books by Volker Braun, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Michael Krüger, Durs Grünbein, Evelyn Schlag, Ulrike Almut Sandig, and Raoul Schrott. As a translator she has won many awards, including the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (twice), the Frederick Nims Memorial Prize and a PEN Heim award. Recent books have been shortlisted for the ALTA poetry award, the Weidenfeld prize and longlisted for the Dublin Literature Prize. Most recently she was awarded the Griffin Prize 2025 for her translation of Durs Grünbein, Psyche Running: Selected Poems 2005-2022 (Seagull, 2024). Her translations of Rainer Maris Rilke and Elisabeth von Ephrussi appear in Edmund de Waal, How to Begin with Chatto & Windus this month, and she is currently working on Heiner Müller's complete poems and Ulrike Draesner’s penelope's cra()ft: a post-epic. www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/people/karen-leeder