Literary Reading
Michael Kumpfmüller is a German writer and Journalist. He was born in 1961 in Munich. Kumpfmüller was raised in Unterschleißheim near Munich. After graduating from high school in Garching in 1980 he moved to Tübingen. He attended the Leibniz Kolleg for a one-year course in General studies. He studied history and German literature at the University of Tübingen from 1981 to 1984, at the University of Vienna from 1984 to 1986 and at the Free University of Berlin from 1987 to 1990. From 1990 to 1994 he was a Ph.D. student. His dissertation with the title Die Schlacht von Stalingrad (English: The Battle of Stalingrad) studied the treatment of the battle of Stalingrad in literary and non-literary texts since 1942. From 1996 to 1998 he worked as a research fellow at the Free University of Berlin in a project on literary intellectuality and media.
Since 1985 he worked as a freelance journalist, writing mostly about labor, war and religion. He started as an intern for the public broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk and worked mostly for the radio. Since 1990 he mostly wrote for newspapers and magazines, as for example Die Zeit, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Frankfurter Rundschau. Since 2000 he is a freelance writer.
During the 2005 German federal election Kumpfmüller became a member of an informal civic initiative founded by Günter Grass which supported the incumbent coalition of Social Democrats and The Greens. Shortly after the election Kumpfmüller became a member of the literary association "Lübecker Literaturtreffen" (also known as "Lübeck 05", "Gruppe 06" or "Gruppe Lübeck 05"), an informal group of German authors and writers.
From April to November 2006 Kumpfmüller was a literary fellow in six cities in Lower Saxony, writing and commenting on current events. In 2007 he was awarded the Alfred-Döblin-Preis for his not yet published novel "Nachricht an alle" (English: "Message to all").
After his performance at the
Fairway Galle Literary Festival in 2018, Michael Kumpfmüller will be coming to Colombo and do a book reading at the Goethe-Institut.
The reading of Michael Kumpfmüller is part of the event series
"Literature in Focus".
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