Ulrike Almut Sandig was born in Großenhain (GDR) in 1979 and now lives with her family in Berlin. She started publishing her poetry by pasting poems onto lamp posts in Leipzig and spreading them on flyers and free post cards. After completing her
Magister in Religious Studies and Modern Indology, she subsequently graduated from the
German Creative Writing Program Leipzig. Two prose books, three pop music albums, radio pieces and four volumes of her poetry have been published to date. For her performances she works with composers and performance artists, such as Hinemoana Baker (NZ), Alif (IND) and Grigory Semenchuk (UKR). In 2015
Ugly Duckling Presse (Brooklyn, USA) launched a selection of her early poems in Bradley Schmidt’s translation. In 2016 Karen Leeder’s stunning translations of Sandig’s latest poetry „Thick of it“ (
Seagull Books, 2018) won the
English PEN translation Pitch and have been awarded with an
PEN America/Heim Translation Fund Grant. In 2018 Sandig and Grigory Semenchuk aka Poetry-Band
„Landschaft“ published their debut album with
Schöffling & Co (Berlin). Meanwhile
Hurst Street Press (Oxford/London, UK) launched a cycle from Sandig’s latest poetry collection in Karen Leeder’s translation. „Grimm“ reanimates the dark side of The Children’s and Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm and uses it as a backdrop for contemporary European concerns: war, migration, the rise of the Right. Ulrike Almut Sandig is a member of the German PEN section.
http://ulrike-almut-sandig.de/english/