Mr. Michael Hulse
Michael Hulse has won numerous awards for his poetry, and has earned the praise of Simon Armitage, C. K. Stead, the late Peter Porter and many others. Reading tours have taken him to the US, Canada and Mexico, India, Australia, New Zealand, and many parts of Europe. He is a permanent judge of the Günter Grass Foundation’s Albatross Prize, a literary award similar to Britain’s Man Booker International, and, with J. M. Coetzee and Susannah Moore, is an ambassador for Adelaide Writers’ Week. In 2009 he co-founded the Hippocrates Prize (www.hippocrates-poetry.org), for a poem on a medical subject, with Warwick colleague Prof. Donald Singer, and together they organize an annual international symposium on poetry and medicine. In 2011 the Hippocrates initiative took the Times Higher Education Award for Excellence and Innovation in the Arts. For more information on Michael, see the literature pages of the British Council’s site.
Select publications
Michael Hulse’s books of poetry include Knowing and Forgetting (1981), Propaganda (1985), Eating Strawberries in the Necropolis (1991), Mother of Battles (1991), Empires and Holy Lands (2002) and, most recently, The Secret History (2009). A new collection, Half-Life, is forthcoming. His best-selling anthology The Twentieth Century in Poetry (co-edited with Simon Rae, 2011) was described by The Guardian as “magnificent”. He has translated more than sixty books from the German, among them works by Goethe, Rilke, Jakob Wassermann, Elfriede Jelinek, W. G. Sebald and Herta Müller. Michael has edited literary magazines, was general editor of a literature classics series, and currently edits the university’s quarterly of new writing, The Warwick Review.
Teaching and supervision
Michael has supervised postgraduate work on Derek Walcott, Geoffrey Hill, Thom Gunn, Philip Larkin, Peter Reading, Julia Darling, Tory Dent, and other poets. He has particular interests in German literature; Australian and New Zealand literature; poetry and the visual arts, especially photography; poetry and philosophy; poetry and medicine; and poetic form(s). At Warwick he teaches poetry skills at undergraduate and graduate levels, and several of his students have gone on to publish and win awards. His hybrid module ‘Reeling and Writhing’, combining intertextual scholarship with poet-to-poet skills, has been described in student feedback as “bloody brilliant”.
