Jürgen Becker

Jürgen Becker was born in Cologne in 1932. After abandoning his studies at university, he began working as a freelance writer and for years he made his living with various jobs. He worked for the broadcasting station WDR and for the publishing houses Rowohlt and Suhrkamp. He was head of the radio drama department of Deutschlandfunk for twenty years, until 1993.

Jürgen Becker received great attention with his first work of prose, Felder (1964), while the two subsequent books Ränder (1968) and Umgebungen (1970) consolidated his reputation as an author of experimental literature. At the same time, he contributed to the emergence of the New Radio Play with his first radio plays. In the 1970s and 1980s, Jürgen Becker focused his attention on poetry.

Jürgen Becker’s work has been awarded numerous prizes. He is a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin-Brandenburg, the German Academy for Language and Poetry, the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature, and the PEN Club. In 2014,  Becker was honoured with Germany’s most prestigious literary award, the Georg Büchner Prize as a »leading voice of contemporary poetry«.

Jürgen Becker passed away on 7 November 2024 in Cologne.