Channel Swimmer by Ulrike Draesner

ULRIKE DRAESNER is one of Germany’s most acclaimed poets and novelists. She has been awarded the Nicolas Born Prize (2016), the Gertrud Kolmar Prize for Poetry (2019), the Bavarian Book Prize (2020), the Grand Prize of the German Literature Fund (2021), and the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer-Foundation (2024), among others. Her many novels and poetry collections include: zu lieben (2024), Die Verwandelten (2023), hell & hörig (2022), Schwitters (2020), and subsong (2014). A member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry, she has been a poet in residence at Goethe University Frankfurt, the University of Oxford, Dartmouth College, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a professor of creative writing at Deutsches Literatur-institut Leipzig and resides in Berlin.

REBECCA BRAUN is Established Professor of German and World Literature at the University of Galway, Ireland. An expert on the production and reception of literature, she has worked extensively with contemporary writers, translators and individuals right across the publishing chain. Her many publications includeWorld Authorship(2020) andAuthors and the World: Literary Authorship in Modern Germany(2022). This is her third book-length translation.

KAREN LEEDER is the Schwarz-Taylor Chair of German at the University of Oxford. As an academic she works especially on modern and contemporary literature and is the co-editor (with Lyn Marven) ofUlrike Draesner: A Companion (2022). She is also a prize-winning translator of modern German literature, most recently Durs Grünbein'sPsyche Running: Selected Poems 2005-2022 (Seagull, 2024) for which she was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize 2025.