Karen J. Leeder, M.A., D.Phil., FRSA, MAE
Schwarz-Taylor Chair of the German Language and Literature
Fellow of The Queen's College
Research
Karen Leeder started her academic life researching the underground poetry, art and music scene that existed in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She has continued her interest in the GDR and has published widely on modern German culture, especially of the post-1945 and contemporary periods; her interests range from poetry and the poetic tradition to modernity, GDR literature; contemporary German culture, lateness, women’s writing, angels, spectres, translation, afterness, Celan, Rilke, Brecht and Durs Grünbein. She has been awarded grants by HEFCE, the British Academy and the AHRC for projects, most recently an Einstein Visiting Fellowship for her work with a team at the FU, Berlin on her project 'AfterWords' exploring what it is to come after in modern literature'.
She is a prize-winning translator of contemporary German literature: including Evelyn Schlag, Raoul Schrott, Michael Krüger, Durs Grünbein, Volker Braun and Ulrike Almut Sandig and has been awarded residences in UK and Germany. Most recently she won the English PEN award and an American PEN/Heim award for her translation of Ulrike Almut Sandig, Thick of it; the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize For Translation for her translation of Durs Grünbein; and an Austrian award for Evelyn Schlag's All Under One Roof and services to Austrian Literature. In 2021 she received the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for Durs Grünbein's Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of my City. In 2024 she has a Building Bridges residency for translation in Dresden Hellerau sponsored by the Goethe Institute and the Freistaat Sachsen.
She was co-editor of the 'Companions to Contemporary German Culture' series with de Gruyter (2012-2022) and is currently co-editor of OGS, also serving on the board of a number of journals e.g. German Monitor and The German Quarterly and has published reviews in a variety of newspapers and journals as well as appearing regularly on radio and television. She was TORCH Knowledge Exchange Fellow with the Southbank Centre, London (2014-2015) and keeps up work especially with MPT, Poet in the City, and The Poetry Society on her project Mediating Modern Poetry: https://www.mmp.mml.ox.ac.uk/.
She is a member of the Wissenschafliche Beirat of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and a member of the Gremium of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach.
Teaching
She has supervised graduate students working in numerous areas of German literature and cultural history, including the GDR novel, poetry and German Unification; representations of the body in contemporary women’s writing, pop literature, Heiner Müller, Günter Grass, Durs Grünbein, the samizdat culture of the GDR, ‘growing up in the Third Reich’, poetic rhythm, memory and the 'Eastern Turn' and welcomes graduates with an interest in modern and contemporary poetry, the GDR, translation, comparative literature, literature of the Berlin Republic, lateness, spectres, Rilke, Brecht.
Books
The Fifth Dimension: Contemporary German Poetry.
Ulrike Draesner: A Companion, ed. by Karen Leeder and Lyn Marven (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2022).
Rereading East Germany: The Literature and Film of the GDR, ed. by Karen Leeder (Cambridge: CUP, 2016, paperback 2019).
Figuring Lateness in Modern German Culture, special edition of New German Critique, ed. by Karen Leeder, 42.1, 125, (2015).
Durs Grünbein: A Companion, ed by Michael Eskin, Karen Leeder and Christopher Young (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2013).
Brecht & the GDR: Politics, Culture, Posterity, ed by Karen Leeder and Laura Bradley, Edinburgh German Yearbook, vol. 5 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011).
Nach Duino: Studien zu Rainer Maria Rilkes späten Gedichten, ed. by Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009).
The Cambridge Companion to Rilke, ed. by Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain (Cambridge: CUP, 2009).
From Stasiland to Ostalgie. The GDR Twenty Years After, ed. by Karen Leeder, Oxford German Studies, 38.3 (2009).
Flaschenpost: German Poetry and the Long Twentieth Century, ed. by Karen Leeder German Life and Letters, LX, No. 3 (2007).
Schaltstelle: Neue deutsche Lyrik im Dialog, ed. by Karen Leeder, German Monitor 69 (Amsterdam, Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2007).
O Chicago! O Widerspruch!: Ein Hundert Gedichte auf Brecht ed. by Karen Leeder and Erdmut Wizisla (Berlin: Transit, 2006).
Empedocles' Shoe: Essays on Brecht's Poetry, ed. by Karen Leeder and Tom Kuhn (London: Methuen, 2002).
Karen Leeder and Tom Kuhn, The Young Brecht (London: Libris, 1992, paperback 1996).
Breaking Boundaries: A New Generation of Poets in the GDR (Oxford: OUP, 1996).
Selected Translations
Durs Grünbein, Psyche Running: Selected Poems 2005-2022, ed. and trans. by Karen Leeder (Calcutta, London, New York: Seagull Books, 2024).
Michael Krüger, In a Cabin, in the Woods, trans. by Karen Leeder (Calcutta, London, New York, Seagull Books, 2024).
Ulrike Almut Sandig, Shining Sheep, trans. by Karen Leeder (London, New York Calcutta, Seagull Books, 2024). Shortlisted for the ALTA Poetry Translation Award 2024.
Ulrike Almut Sandig, - - - – – – - - -, trans. by Karen Leeder, Versopolis for Ledbury Festival (Hereford: Five Seasons Press, 2023).
Volker Braun, Great Fugue, trans. by Karen Leeder and David Constantine (Ripon: Smokestack, 2022).
Ulrike Almut Sandig, Monsters Like Us, trans. by Karen Leeder (London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2022). Longlisted for the Dublin Literature Prize 2024
Durs Grünbein, For the Dying Calves: Beyond Literature - Oxford Lectures, trans. by Karen Leeder (London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2021).
Durs Grünbein, Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of my City, trans. by Karen Leeder (London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, November 2020). Special anniversary edition for 75th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden. Winner of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize 2021.
Ulrike Almut Sandig, I am a field full of rapeseed, give cover to deer and shine like thirteen oil-paintings laid one on top of the other, trans. by Karen Leeder (London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2020).
Michael Krüger, Postscript, trans. by Karen Leeder (New York: Sheep Meadow, 2019).
Gerd Ludwig, Evelyn Schlag, Karen Leeder, I LOVE AFRICA Festival La Gacilly-Baden Photo 2018 (Baden: Edition Lammerhuber, 2019).
Michael Krüger, The God behind the Window, trans. by Karen Leeder and Peter Thompson (London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2019).
Raoul Schrott, The Sex of the Angel: The Saints in their Heaven: A Breviary, trans. by Karen Leeder (London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2019). Shortlisted for Schlegel-Tieck Prize 2020.
Ulrike Almut Sandig, Grimm trans. by Karen Leeder (Oxford: Hurst Street Press, 2018), special limited edition with illustrations.
Evelyn Schlag, All under one Roof, ed. and trans. by Karen Leeder (Manchester: Carcanet, 2018). Poetry Book Society Recommendation Summer 2018; Austrian government award 2020.
Ulrike Almut Sandig, Thick of it, trans. by Karen Leeder (Calcutta, New York, London, Seagull Books, 2018). Winner of an English PEN award and an American PEN PEN-Heim award (2016); Runner-up for Schlegel-Tieck Proze 2019.
Michael Krüger, Last Day of the Year: Selected Poems, trans. by Karen Leeder (New York: Sheep Meadow Press, October 2014)
Volker Braun, Rubble Flora: Selected Poems, ed. and trans. by David Constantine and Karen Leeder (Calcutta, London, New York: Seagull Books September 2014). Commended for Popescu Poetry Translation Prize 2015.
Wilhelm Schmid, High on Low: Harnessing the Power of Unhappiness, trans. by Karen Leeder (New York: Upper West Side Philosophers Press, 2014). Winner of Independent Publisher Book Award for Self Help (2015), Named Finalist for a Next Generation Indie Book Award for Self Help (2015); Gold Medal and Winner of Living Now book Award (2015)
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Fatal Numbers: Why count on Chance?, trans. by Karen Leeder (New York: Upper West Side Philosophers Press, 2011). Shortlisted for National Book Critics Circle Award 2011.
After Brecht: A Celebration, ed. by Karen Leeder (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006).
Evelyn Schlag, Selected Poems, ed. and trans. by Karen Leeder (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2004). Winner of Schlegel-Tieck Prize for Translation 2005.
Raoul Schrott, The Desert of Lop, trans. by Karen Leeder (London: Macmillan Picador, 2004).
Michael Krüger, Scenes from the Life of a Best-selling Author, trans. by Karen Leeder (London: Harvill Press, 2002; pbk. Vintage 2004).
Selected Articles
‘Ulrike Draesner’s Poetry of Science’, in Ulrike Draesner: A Companion, ed. by Karen Leeder and Lyn Marven (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2022), pp. 95-115.
‘Germany and Austro-Hungary’, in History of World War One Poetry, ed. by Jane Potter (Cambridge: CUP, 2022), pp. 99-117.
‘Footpaths in the Snow: Karen Leeder, Michael Krϋger and Paul Muldoon in Conversation on Poetry, Translation, and Publishing’, in The Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to World Authorship, ed. by Tobias Boes, Rebecca Braun and Emily Spiers (Oxford, OUP, 2020), pp. 343-353.
‘“I am a Double-voiced […] Bird”: Identity and Voice in Ulrike Almut Sandig's Poetry’, special edition of Oxford German Studies, Ulrike Almut Sandig: Prose, Poetry and Performance, ed. by Heike Bartel and Nicola Thomas, OGS, Vol. 47.3 2018, pp. 329-350.
‘“Anachronism”: Michael Hamburger and the Time and Place of Late Work’, in Gordon MacMullan and Sam Smiles (eds.), Late Style and its Discontents: Biography, Epoch and Modernity in Art, Literature and Music (Oxford: OUP, 2016), pp. 174-187.
'After Images – Afterlives: Remembering the GDR in the Berlin Republic’, in Rereading East Germany: The Literature and Film of the GDR (Cambridge: CUP, 2016), pp. 214-237.
‘Figuring Lateness in Modern German Culture’, in Karen Leeder, ed., Figuring Lateness in Modern German Culture, special edition of New German Critique, 125, (2015), 1-29.
‘German Poetry of the First World War’, Requiem: The Great War, Agenda 48, Nos 3-4 (November, 2014), pp. 171-178.
‘“Argo Cargo”: The Role of the Classical Past in Contemporary German Poetry’, in Barbara Köhler: Niemands Frau, ed. by Georgina Paul, German Monitor 78 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), pp. 19-50.
‘Durs Grünbein and the Poetry of Science’, in Durs Grünbein: A Companion, ed. by Michael Eskin, Karen Leeder, Christopher Young (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2013), pp. 67-94.
‘“Das Gen des Todes”: Altersstil, Spätstil und Spätsein bei Gottfried Benn’, in Benn Forum. Beiträge zur literarischen Moderne, Bd. 3 (2012/2013), ed. by Joachim Dyck, Hermann Korte, Nadine Jessica Schmidt (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2013, 193-211.
‘“Nihilimus und Musik”: Gottfried Benn (1886-1956) – The Unlikely Expressionist’, Oxford German Studies (special edition on Expressionism, ed. by Ritchie Robertson) 42.1 (2013), 23-37.
‘“After the Massacre of Illusions”: Specters of the GDR in the work of Volker Braun’, in Transformations of German Cultural Identity 1989-2009, ed. by Anne Fuchs and Kathleen James Chakraborty, special edition of New German Critique no 116 (Spring 2012), 103-118.
‘‘“Vielleicht habe ich sozusagen einen dichterischen Kopf”: Karen Leeder im Gespräch mit Michael Krüger’, in Michael Krüger: Eine Einführung, ed. by Carmine Chillieno (Dresden: Thelem Universitätsverlag, 2012), pp. 233-252 (reprint from 2007).
‘Lateness and Late Style in Brecht’s last poetry’, in Brecht and the GDR: Politics, Culture, Posterity, ed. Laura Bradley and Karen Leeder, Edinburgh German Yearbook, 5 (2011), 45-64.
‘Dances of Death: A last Literature from the GDR’, in Twenty Years On: Competing Memories of the GDR in Post-Unification German Culture, ed. by Renate Rechtien and Dennis Tate (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), pp.187-202.
‘“Nachleben”: Volker Braun and The Death and Afterlife of the GDR, in The GDR Between Conformism and Subversion, ed. by Pól O’Dochartaigh, special number of German Life and Letters, GLL, 3/2010, 265-279.
‘“In his own time”: Michael Hamburger’s Lateness’, in From Charlottenburg to Middleton. Michael Hamburger (1924-2007). Poet, Translator, Critic, ed. by Joyce Crick, Martin Liebscher and Martin Swales (Munich: Iudicium, 2010), pp. 13-40.
‘Ingeborg Bachmann as poet and myth: a case study in cultural impact’, in Cultural Impact in the German Context: Studies in Transmission, Reception and Influence, ed. by Rebecca Braun and Lyn Marven (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), pp. 368-394.
‘“Totentänze”: Volker Braun’s Late Poems – Postscript on the End of Utopia’, in Dislocation and Reorientation: Exile, Division and the End of Communism in German Culture and Politics, ed. by Pól O’Dochartaigh, Axel Goodbody and Dennis Tate, Festschrift in honour of Ian Wallace (Amsterdam – New York, Rodopi, 2009), pp. 33-46.
‘Rilke’s Legacy in the English-Speaking World’, in Cambridge Companion to Rilke, ed. by Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), pp.189-203.
‘Raoul Schrott’, for Kindlers Literatur Lexikon (KLL), ed. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold, 3. völlig neue bearbeitete Auflage (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009).
‘Günter Grass as Poet’, in The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass, ed. by Stuart Taberner (Cambridge: CUP, 2009).
‘Heimat in der neuen deutschen Lyrik’, in Gedächtnis und Identität: Die deutsche Literatur nach der Vereinigung. Bilanz und Perspektiven, Fabrizio Cambi (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008).
‘The Desire of the Angel: Myth, Message and Metaphor in Contemporary German Literature and Film’, in Third Agents: Secret Protagonists of the Modern Imagination, ed. by Ian Cooper, Ekkehard Knorer and Bernhard Malkmus (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008), 214-228.
‘Günter Grass's Lateness: Reading Grass with Adorno and Said’, in Changing the Nation: Günter Grass in International Perspective, ed. by Rebecca Braun Frank Brunsen and (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008), 49-66.
‘“Eine Grammatik der Liebe”. Ulrike Draesners Lyrik’, in Familien – Geschlechter – Macht: Beziehungen im Werk Ulrike Draesners, ed. by Stephanie Catani and Friedhelm Marx (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), 37-60.
‘Des toten Dichters gedenkend: Remembering Brecht in Contemporary German Poetry’, in Verwische die Spuren. Bertolt Brecht's Work and Legacy, ed. by Robert Gillett and Godela Weiss-Sussex (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008), 277-293.
‘“Nachwort zu Brechts Tod”: The Afterlife of a Classic in Modern German Poetry’, Brecht und der Tod / Brecht and Death, ed. by Jürgen Hillersheim, Matthias Mayer, and Stephen Brockmann = special edition of Brecht Yearbook / Brecht Jahrbuch, 32 (2007), 333-354.
‘Sarah Kirsch’, in Deutschsprachige Lyriker des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, ed. by Ursula Heukenkap and Peter Geist (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2007), 249-560.
‘Die Poesie der Wissenschaft und die Wissenschaft der Poesie. Das Gedicht im Labor des 20. Jarhunderts’, in Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik, ed. by Georg Baumgart, Theo Elm, Christine Maillard (Bern: Lang, 2007), Band 7, 437-445.
‘"Cold media": The science of poetry and the poetry of science’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 30.4 (2005), 301-311.
‘Principles of Correspondence: Scientist, Explorer, Poet in the work of Raoul Schrott’, in Blueprints for No-Man’s Land: Connections in Contemporary Austrian Culture, ed. by Janet Stuart and Simon Ward (Frankfurt: Lang, 2005), 173-189.
‘”spritzende brocken: der erinnerung / versteht sich”: Thomas Kling’s poetry of memory’, Literary Reflections of Modern War, a special edition of Forum for Modern Language Studies, ed. by Nicolas Martin, 41.2 (2005), 174-186.
‘Another Piece of the Past: Stories of a New German Identity’, Oxford German Studies, special number for T.J. Reed, 33 (2004), 25-147.
‘“Augenblick ohne Zeitmaß”: Translation and its tropes in the work of Evelyn Schlag’, in Evelyn Schlag: Readings of Text, ed. by Beverley Driver Eddy (Bern and New York: Lang, 2004), 153-170
‘“Time, Love and Literature!”: The Work of Elegy in the Poetry of Evelyn Schlag’, Austrian Studies (The Austrian Lyric), 12 (2004), 231-248
‘“rhythmische historia”: Contemporary poems of the First World War by Thomas Kling and Raoul Schrott’, in Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German-speaking world since 1500, ed. by Christian Emden and David Midgely (Fankfurt: Peter Lang, 2004), 281-305.
‘The “poeta doctus” and the new German literature’, special edition of The Germanic Review, ed. by Michael Eskin, Vol. 77.1 (2002), 51-67.
‘Glücklose Engel: Fictions of German History and The End of the German Democratic Republic’, in Recasting German Identity: Culture, Politics and Literature in the Berlin Republic, ed. by Francis Finlay and Stuart Taberner (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), pp. 99-109.
‘“After Brecht”: The reception of Brecht’s poetry in English’, in Empedocles’ Shoe: Essays on Brecht’s poetry, ed. by Tom Kuhn and Karen Leeder (London: Methuen, 2002), pp. 231-256
‘”Erkenntnistheoretische Maschinen”: Questions of the sublime in Raoul Schrott’, Emerging writers in German, German Life and Letters, ed. by Stuart Taberner and Francis Finlay, 55: 2 (2002), 51-67
‘Vom Unbehagen in der Einheit: Autobiographical writing by women after 1989’, in Autobiography by Women in German, ed. by Mererid Puw Davies, Beth Linklater and Gisela Shaw (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 249-272.
‘Two-way Mirrors: The Possibilities of the Subject in the poetry of Barbara Köhler’, in Entgegenkommen: Dialogues with Barbara Köhler, ed. Georgina Paul and Helmut Schmitz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 63-92.
‘Those born later read Brecht: The reception of Brecht’s “An die Nachgeborenen”’, in Brecht’s Poetry of Political Exile, ed. by Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), 211-240.
‘Post-1945 Women’s Poetry in East and West’, in A History of Women’s Writing in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, ed. by Jo Catling (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), pp. 200-215.
‘"B.B.s spät gedenkend": Reading Brecht in the 1980s and 1990s’, in Brecht 100<=>2000, = special edition of Brecht Yearbook, ed. by John Rouse, Marc Silberman, Florian Vaßen, 24 (1999), 111-129.
‘Modern German Poetry’, in Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture, ed. by Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried van der Will (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), pp. 193-212.
‘The Ninth Elegy’, in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies: Cambridge Readings, ed. by Roger Paulin and Peter Hutchinson (London and Riverside, CA: Duckworth and Ariadne Press, 1996), pp. 152-70
‘"ich fühle mich in grenzen wohl": The metaphors of boundary and the boundaries of metaphor in Prenzlauer Berg', in Prenzlauer Berg: Bohemia in East Berlin?, ed. by Philip Brady and Ian Wallace, German Monitor (Amsterdam, Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995), 20-44
‘"Dunkles zu sagen": Die Sprache der Liebe in der Lyrik Ingeborg Bachmanns’, in Kritische Landnahme: Ingeborg Bachmanns Werke in der Rezeption der 90er Jahre, ed. by Robert Pichl and Alexander Stillmark (Wien: Hora, 1994), pp. 11-21.
‘"eine abstellhalle des authentischen": Postmodernism and Poetry in the New Germany’, in The Individual, Identity and Innovation: Signals from Contemporary Literature and the New Germany, ed. by Arthur Williams and Stuart Parkes (Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 201-220.
‘Towards a profane Hölderlin: Representations and revisions of Hölderlin in some GDR poetry’, in Neue Ansichten: The Reception of Romanticism in the Literature of the GDR, ed. by Howard Gaskill, Karin McPherson and Andrew Barker (GDR Monitor No.6) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), pp. 212-231.