Manfred Peter Hein`s poetry is highly compact and condensed, as if being hardened for a final form that has left all ornaments behind. The author, who has long lived in northeastern Europe apart from the bustle of life, writes poetry of the natural world with an intensity beyond that of most other present-day poets in the German language. He is also an avid traveler who assimilates foreign landscapes and circumstances of life, soundly weaving them into his poems - and who seeks to decode the »tidings of error« in Ramallah, Jerusalem, and the Hindukush. Beyond all ideology, he has bound the symbols Srebrenica, Lidice, Katyn, and Birkenau in a single line of verse as places to which his memories and his lyrical voice are referenced, and must continually be referenced.
Manfred Peter Hein
was born in 1931 in Darkehmen, East Prussia. He studied German, history, art history, and Finno-Ugric in Marburg, Munich, Helsinki, and Göttingen. Since the 1950s he has lived in Finland. He has published many volumes of his poetry, prose, essays, and translations, and has edited various literary volumes. For his poetry and translations he has been honored with renowned German and international literature prizes, in 2006 with the Rainer Malkowski Prize.
