Tel: +44 (0)24 7652 2335
Email: m dot w dot hulse at warwick dot ac dot uk

G.02
Millburn House, University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL

About

Professor Michael Hulse teaches poetry and comparative literature. He has won numerous awards for his poetry, and has earned the praise of Gwyneth Lewis, Simon Armitage, C. K. Stead, the late Peter Porter and many others. His 2013 collection, Half-Life, was chosen as a Book of the Year in the Australian Book Review, where John Kinsella described it as “brilliant”, “devastatingly disturbing” and “technically perfect”. Reading tours have taken him to the US, Canada and Mexico, India, Australia, New Zealand, and many parts of Europe. He has been a judge of the Günter Grass Foundation’s Albatross Prize, a literary award similar to Britain’s Man Booker International, and, with J. M. Coetzee and Susanna Moore, served as an ambassador for Adelaide Writers’ Week. In 2009 he co-founded the Hippocrates Prize, for a poem on a medical subject, with Warwick colleague Prof. Donald Singer, and together they organize an annual international symposium on poetry and medicine. In 2011 the Hippocrates initiative took the Times Higher Education Award for Excellence and Innovation in the Arts. For more information on Michael, see the literature pages of the British Council’s site.

Teaching and supervision

Michael has supervised postgraduate work on Derek Walcott, Geoffrey Hill, and other contemporary poets, and has particular interests in German literature; Australian and New Zealand literature; poetry and the visual arts; poetry and philosophy; poetry and medicine; and poetic form(s). At Warwick he teaches poetry skills and comparative literature at undergraduate and graduate levels, and several of his students have gone on to publish and win awards. His hybrid module ‘Reeling and Writhing’, combining intertextual scholarship with poet-to-poet skills, has been described in student feedback as “bloody brilliant”. A long-serving member of the Writing Programme, he established the annual anthology of writing by MA students, created the reading series (now Warwick Thursdays), and oversaw the digitization of the Writers at Warwick archive.

Selected publications

Michael Hulse’s books of poetry include Knowing and Forgetting (1981), Propaganda (1985), Eating Strawberries in the Necropolis (1991), Mother of Battles (1991), Empires and Holy Lands (2002), The Secret History (2009) and, most recently, Half-Life (2013). His best-selling anthology The Twentieth Century in Poetry (co-edited with Simon Rae, 2011) was described by The Guardian as “magnificent”. He has translated more than sixty books from the German, among them works by Goethe, Rilke, Jakob Wassermann, Alfred Andersch, Elfriede Jelinek and W. G. Sebald. Michael has edited literary magazines, including The Warwick Review, and was general editor of a literature classics series.