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About German writer (and photographer), Jürgen BECKER (*1932)
Jürgen BECKER is a German poet, prose writer and author of radio plays. In 1950, the then 18-year-old returned from Erfurt to his native Cologne. In the 1960s he emerged as a member of the 'Gruppe 47' with a strongly experimental kind of literature that focused on the open form, primarily in opposition to conventional narrative. In later texts this impulse is withdrawn, while landscape still plays an important role in his poetry. In addition to the poems that constitute his main body of work, Becker also wrote short stories and radio plays. The citation for the Georg Büchner Prize, which he was awarded in 2014, praised him as "an authoritative voice of contemporary poetry" who "decisively shaped German-language poetry for generations." His son is the photographer and filmmaker Boris BECKER.
Photo books by Jürgen BECKER
- 'Eine Zeit ohne Wörter' (A Time Without Words, 1971)
'New York 1972' (2012)
Awards
- 1964: Lower Saxony Promotion Prize for Young Artists 1965/66: Scholarship at the German Academy in Rome Villa Massimo 1967: Prize of the Gruppe 47 1968: Literature Prize of the City of Cologne 1980: Literature Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts; German Critics' Prize 1987: Bremen Literature Prize 1994: Peter Huchel Prize; Berlin Literature Prize 1995: Heinrich Böll Prize 1998: Rhenish Literature Prize Siegburg 2001: Uwe Johnson Prize 2006: Hermann Lenz Prize 2007: Düsseldorf Literature Prize 2009: Schiller Ring of the German Schiller Foundation 2011: Thuringian Literature Prize 2013: Günter Eich Prize 2014: Georg Büchner Prize
Exhibitions
- 2017: 'Jürgen Becker. New York 1972', Museum of Photography Braunschweig