Jürgen Becker (poet)

In 2012, under the title '"In Hell of Silence" The Author Jürgen Becker', the first documentary about Jürgen Becker appeared, by Christoph Felder, an 80-minute portrait (b / w, publisher Die Neue Sachlichkeit, production CFF) with his own words and some few short excerpts of his colleagues Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson and Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Group 47).

Jürgen Becker emerged in the sixties, with a highly experimental kind of literature, which sat on the open form mainly from opposition to conventional narrative. In later texts, the landscape continues to play an important role in Becker's poetry. In addition to the poems that make up his major work, Becker also wrote stories and radio plays. Since 1994, his contributions have appeared in the journal Sinn und Form, edited by the Akademie der Künste (Berlin).

Becker has been married to the artist Rango Bohne since 1965 and lives near Cologne, in Odenthal. Becker's son is the photographer and filmmaker Boris Becker [de].

From 1960, Becker was a participant in the group 47, whose literary prize he won at the last meeting of the group in 1967. Since 1969, he has been a member of the PEN Centre Germany and the Academy of Arts (Berlin), since 1974, the German Academy of Language and Poetry, since 1984 the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, and since 2009 the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts.

From 1959 to 1964, he was a member of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, and from 1964 to 1966, lecturer in the Rowohlt publishing house. He became a freelance writer in 1968. From 1973, he was director of the Suhrkamp Theater Publishing, and from 1974 to 1993, director of the radio play department in Deutschlandfunk.

Jürgen Becker's family moved from Cologne to Erfurt in 1939, so that he experienced the war as a child in Thuringia. In 1947, he went to Waldbröl in West Germany. In 1950, he moved back to his native city of Cologne. From 1950 to 1953, he attended a high school there until graduation. He then began studying German, which he broke off in 1954.

Jürgen Becker (born 10 July 1932, in Cologne) is a German poet, prose writer and radio play author. He won the 2014 Georg Büchner Prize.