Nicolas Born

Nicolas Born (31 December 1937 in Duisburg – 7 December 1979 in Lüchow-Dannenberg) was a German writer.

Nicolas Born was – together with Rolf Dieter Brinkmann – one of the most important and most innovative German poets of his generation. His two novels, Die erdabgewandte Seite der Geschichte, and Die Fälschung, have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and count among the most important works of German literature of the 1970s.

Nicolas Born grew up in a lower-middle-class family in the Ruhrgebiet. He worked making printing accessories in a chemical process for a large printing company in Essen, until he was able – with the help of a first literary prize, the Förderpreis Nordrhein-Westfalen, for his first novel, "Der Zweite Tag", to go to Berlin, and live from writing. He was an autodidact, and with his poems and novel scripts, soon gathered enough attention from known writers and critics like Ernst Meister, Johannes Bobrowski, Günter Grass, and Hans Bender, to get a scholarship for the renowned Berliner Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin in 1963/1964, where he met other young writers like Hans Christoph Buch, Hermann Peter Piwitt, Hubert Fichte, Peter Bichsel, and others, and was taught by Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Peter Rühmkorf, Peter Weiss, and others. In preparation for his stay at the Iowa International Writers Workshop in Iowa City in 1969/1970, Born read more and more contemporary American poets. In Iowa, he met Charles Bukowski, Anselm Hollo, Ted Berrigan, and many others, was friends with John Batki, Allen Ginsberg, Eric Torgersen, Tom Raworth and others. In the renowned "red frame"-series, "Das neue Buch", Born published, in 1972, his third collection of poems, "Das Auge des Entdeckers" (The eye of the explorer), largely influenced by contemporary American poetry, utopian literature, and a more relaxed perspective on political effectiveness of literature that was commonly known among the politically left-oriented colleagues of his generation. The book was a great success, selling very well for a poetry-collection, and made Born together with Rolf Dieter Brinkmann one of the most important and innovative poets of his generation in Germany.

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