The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Michael Hulse has won numerous awards for his poetry, among them first prizes in the National Poetry Competition and the Bridport Poetry Competition (twice) as well as the Society of Authors' Eric Gregory Award and Cholmondeley Award. He has been editor of a literature classics series and of literary quarterlies, has scripted news and documentary programmes for Deutsche Welle television, and has taught at the universities of Erlangen, Eichstätt, Cologne, Zurich, and currently Warwick. Among over sixty books he has translated from the German are titles by W. G. Sebald and Elfriede Jelinek and, for Penguin, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther and Jakob Wassermann's Caspar Hauser.

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in 1875 in Prague. He studied literature, art history and philosophy in both Munich and Prague, and is often considered one of the German language's greatest 20th century poets. His two most famous verse sequences are the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose works are the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.