Speaker
Josephine Balmer; Ulrike Draesner; Karen Leeder
Venue
Lecture Theatre, Ioannou Centre, 66 St Giles
Date
to
An event co-hosted with the Department of German, University of Oxford.
A reading from Josephine Balmer’s Things We Leave Behind (ed. by Paschalis Nikolaou, Shearsman 2025) and Ulrike Draesner's penelope's cr()ft: a postepic (German original: penelopes sch()ff: postepos, Penguin 2025), followed by a conversation of the two authors with Karen Leeder.
Josephine Balmer is a poet, classical translator, research scholar and literary critic. Her published works include the acclaimed translation Sappho: Poems and Fragments (1984, 1986 & 1992), and Classical Women Poets (1996), both with Bloodaxe. After volumes of Catullus and Ovid, her 2013 volume Piecing Together the Fragments: Translating Classical Verse, Creating Contemporary Poetry, a full-length monograph on creative classical translation for OUP . Her The Paths of Survival, tracing the often fragile survival of the written word from antiquity to the present day, was published by Shearsman and subsequently shortlisted for the 2017 London Hellenic Prize. Her work has been awarded a Wingate Foundation Scholarship, a South East Arts’ Writers Bursary, two Authors’ Foundation Awards, an inaugural US Lambda Literary Award and an Arts’ Council Write Out Loud Award. Her most recent volume, Things We Leave Behind: Selected Poems (2025) was edited by Paschalis Nikolaou and named one of the ‘Observer Best Poetry Books’ of 2025.
Ulrike Draesner is a freelance writer living in Berlin and in Leipzig, where she has been director of the German Literature Institute Leipzig since 2018. She received her doctorate in German Medieval Studies in 1992. Over the past twenty-five years, she has published poetry collections, novels, several collections of stories and essays, radio plays, translations, opera libretti, and has participated in numerous intermedia projects. She has had residencies in Germany, Switzerland, USA and Oxford. Ulrike Draesner's work has received many awards, most recently the Grand Prize of the German Literature Fund 2021 and the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in the summer of 2024 along with the Gisela Elsner Literature Prize and the Christine Lavant Prize for penelopes sch()ff: postepos (English: penelope’s cr()ft: a postepic), published by Penguin in 2025. A volume of her poetry, This porous fabric: Selected Poems, translated by Iain Galbraith appeared with Shearsman in 2022.
Karen Leeder is a writer, translator and Schwarz-Taylor Chair of German Language Literature at the University of Oxford. She teaches and publishes especially on modern and contemporary poetry and is currently PI on the project ‘AfterWords’ with an Einstein Visiting Fellowship at the FU, Berlin. She also 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 most recently, the Griffin Prize 2025 for her translation of Durs Grünbein, Psyche Running: Selected Poems 2005-2022 (Seagull, 2024).