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profile/ingeborg-bachmann.md
Translated from the German by Kai Maristed
Published: Tue Jan 30 2018
Eva Lundsager, Were now like (detail), 2021, oil on canvas
AGNI 83 Print Only

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926—1973) launched her career as a poet and fiction writer by winning a prize at age twenty-seven from the Gruppe 47, a collective of writers that included Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll. She became one of the best-known and most acclaimed German-language poets of the post-war generation. Of Paul Celan, whom she had a long affair with and later introduced (disastrously) to the Gruppe 47, she wrote, “I loved him more than my own life.” Their poetry remained in dialogue long after their relationship ended.

Kai Maristed is the author of the novels Broken Ground (Counterpoint, 2003); Fall (Random House, 1996); and Out After Dark (Permanent Press, 1993), finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award; and as well as the story collection Belong to Me (Random House, 1998), which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Her stories and essays have appeared most recently or are forthcoming in Southwest Review, The Iowa Review, Epiphany, AGNIMichigan Quarterly Review, and Ploughshares. She is also a playwright and translator, with a new translation and adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Lulu currently in development. (updated 4/2023)
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