Ulrike Draesner

Ulrike Draesner was born in 1962 in Munich, Germany. She is a poet, a writer of long and short fiction and cultural essays. She has published six major poetry collections, eight novels, two of which were nominated for the German Book Prize, three collections of stories and essays respectively. Ulrike has received numerous literary prizes, most recently the Großen Preis des Literaturfonds (2021), the Literaturpreis Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation 2024, the Gisela-Elsner-Prize and the Christine-Lavant-Poetry-Prize in 2025.

She has been awarded poetic readerships at German and international universities. Ulrike lived in Oxford as Poet in Residence from 2015 to 2017; in 2018, she was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at the Deutsche Literaturinstitut Leipzig. She taught German Literature and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College, US, in 2022, and at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2024. She is a member of PEN Berlin, the Berlin Academy of Arts, and the German Academy of Language and Poetry. Her novel Kanalschwimmer was published in 2019 by Penguin Verlag, and later translated into English by Rebecca Braun and published by Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. in August 2025.

Ulrike’s participation in the festival is supported by the Goethe-Institut Irland. She will join us remotely from Germany for a hybrid event.