Michael Hulse is an English translator, critic and poet, notable especially for his translations of German novels by W. G. Sebald, Herta Müller, and Elfriede Jelinek.
Life and works
Hulse was educated locally in Stoke-on-Trent until the age of sixteen, when his family moved to Germany. From 1973 to 1977 he studied at the University of St Andrews, where he graduated with a first-class M.A. Hons in German. From 1977 to 1979 he taught at the University of Erlangen, and from 1981 to 1983 at the Catholic University of Eichstätt, dividing the intervening period between England and South East Asia. Following two years in Durham and Oxford he returned to Germany, where he chiefly worked freelance in Cologne for Deutsche Welle television and in publishing. Most of his work as translator, both of German literature, including works by W. G. Sebald, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Elfriede Jelinek, and Jakob Wassermann, and of art criticism, belongs to these years, and he was general editor of the Könemann literature classics series. In this period he also lectured and led workshops and seminars at universities, sometimes for the British Council, and from 1999 to 2002 led a four-year translation project in Ethiopia for the Goethe Institut. For two years he co-edited the literary quarterly Stand with John Kinsella, and from 2001 to 2004 he was co-director with David Hartnett of the small press Leviathan and editor of Leviathan Quarterly. Since 2002 Hulse has taught poetry and comparative literature at the University of Warwick, where in 2007 he established The Warwick Review, a quarterly magazine of international writing, of which Sean O'Brien wrote: "in scope and seriousness it offers a useful model for a contemporary literary-cultural magazine Curiosity, imagination and readiness to encounter the unfamiliar are qualities The Warwick Review asks of the reader, and in turn does much to embody".. In 2007 he co-organized with Warwick colleague Eileen John a major international conference on poetry and philosophy at which the guest poets were Geoffrey Hill ; Jorie Graham, Susan Stewart and John Koethe ; Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky ; and Robert Gray and Kevin Hart. With Donald Singer, Professor of Clinical Pharmacology at Warwick, he established the Hippocrates initiative in 2009, which awards the annual Hippocrates Prize for poetry on a medical subject and convenes an annual international symposium. In 2011 the initiative won a Times Higher Education Award for Excellence and Innovation in the Arts.
In 2017, Michael Hulse appeared in a retrospective edition of University Challenge, representing the University of St. Andrews. On the show, he appeared to be wearing the Order of Lenin.
