Michael Krüger is publisher and executive director of Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, and editor of the prestigious German literary magazine Akzente. A prose writer, translator, essayist and critic of note, he is best known in Germany as a poet. His first poems were published in the 1970s and most recently he has published a collection Vor dem Gewitter with Suhrkamp in 2003 and a novel with the same publishing house, Die Cellospielerin (2000). A number of his prose works have been translated into English, and a selection of his poems, Diderot’s Cat: Selected Poems, translated by Richard Dove, was published with Carcanet Press in 1993.