Dieter M. Gräf

Dieter M. Gräf, born in 1960 in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, is regarded as one of the most distinctive and linguistically powerful poets writing in German today. Since 2005, he has lived and worked as a poet and artist in Berlin, increasingly expanding his practice to include photography and project-based art.

Gräf has published four collections of poetry in Germany, including Rauschstudie: Vater und Sohn (2002) and Buch Vier (2012), with leading publishers such as Suhrkamp and Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt. He also edited the influential anthology Das leuchtende Buch. Die Welt als Wunder im Gedicht (Insel Verlag, 2004). Internationally, his poetry collections—including Tousled Beauty and Tussi Research (Green Integer, Los Angeles, in collaboration with Villa Aurora)—have appeared in the United States, Croatia, and France, and his work has been translated into numerous languages.

A member of the German PEN Center, Gräf has served as a juror for the prestigious Literarischer März competition in Darmstadt and as a visiting professor at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. He has held writer-in-residence positions at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, the German Festival in India, Villa Massimo in Rome, Deutsches Haus at NYU in New York, Villa Decius in Krakow, and the Goethe-Institut in Beijing. His work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Leonce-und-Lena Prize from the city of Darmstadt.

Critics have praised Gräf for his uncompromising language and his poetic expeditions into uncharted territory. His poems have been described as "precision instruments" (Nico Bleutge, Neue Zürcher Zeitung) that attempt "something elemental, fundamental," shifting the coordinates of our perception of the world (Michael Braun, Frankfurter Rundschau).

Dieter M. Gräf lives and works in Berlin.