Shearsman Books

Shearsman Titles

Sailor's Home (anthology)

About the author

Uwe Kolbe was born in East Berlin in 1957 to a family that sailed the inland waterways. He was raised in East Berlin, undertook military service after leaving school in 1976, and first published his poetry in the journal Sinn und Form in June 1976. In 1980-81 he undertook a course at the Johannes R. Becher Literary Institute in Leipzig, the GDR's leading centre for the study of poetics and creative writing. Between 1982 and 1985 he was banned from publishing because of anti-regime statements, particularly one in acrostic form in a poem, which the censors had failed to notice. He survived this period by taking up literary translation. From 1982-1987 he published the magazine Mikado with Lothar Trolle and Bernd Wagner. In 1985 he was granted a visa which permitted him to travel to western Europe and the USA. From the summer of 1988 he lived in exile in Hamburg, but returned to Berlin in 1993. From 1997-2004 he was Director of the Literature and Theatre Studio at the University of Tübingen, and has since returned to live in Berlin.

Uwe Kolbe has held guest lectureships at the Universities of Texas at Austin, Vienna and Essen, and has been awarded a number of important prizes. Aside from his six collections of poetry, he has also published Vaterlandkanal (a travel book, 1990), Die Situation (1994), Renegatentermine (essays, 1998), Der Tote von Belintasch (detective story, 2002) and Thrakische Spiele (detective novel, 2005).