Ulrike Almut Sandig was born in Großenhain (GDR) in 1979 and now lives with her family in Berlin. She started publishing her poetry by pasting poems onto lamp posts in Leipzig and spreading them on flyers and free post cards. After completing her Magister in Religious Studies and Modern Indology, she subsequently graduated from the German Creative Writing Program Leipzig. Previous publications include radio plays and audio-books of poetry and pop music. She has been invited to many international literary festivals and exchanges, been granted literary residencies in Helsinki, Wellington, Delhi, Mumbai and Sydney, her fiction and poetry has been widely anthologised. In spring 2015 she was Writer in Residence at the University of Nottingham. In 2015 Ugly Duckling Press (Brooklyn, USA) launched a selection of her early poems in Bradley Schmidt’s translation. Karen Leeder’s translations of Sandig’s Thick of it (Dickicht, 2011) will appear with Seagull press in 2018.

Karen Leeder is a writer, translator and academic, and teaches German at New College, Oxford. She translates a number of German writers into English: most recently Volker Braun, Rubble Flora: Selected Poems, with David Constantine for Seagull. She was awarded an English PEN award and an American PEN/Heim award for her translations from Ulrike Almut Sandig’s Dickicht (Thick of it) in 2016.