Jeremy Adler

Education

He was born in London in 1947 and was educated at St Marylebone Grammar School (1958–1966) and Queen Mary College London (1966–1969), where he graduated with a first class degree in German with English. He studied for a PhD at Westfield College London, obtaining his degree in 1978 with a thesis on the chemistry of German polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Elective Affinities under Claus Bock.

Career

He was a lecturer in German at Westfield College London (1974–1991) and was awarded a personal chair at Queen Mary and Westfield College London (1991–1994). He was professor of German and head of department at King’s College London (1994–2004).

He was a council member of the Poetry Society (1973–1977) and a member of the Bielefeld Colloquium für neue Poesie (1979–2003). He was awarded the Goethe Prize of the English Goethe Society (1977) and a Stipend of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel (1979, 1985, 1990). He was a joint honorary secretary of the English Goethe Society (1986–2004) and a council member of the International Goethe Society (1995–2003). For ten years he was founding chairman of the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust (1996–2006). He was a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin (1985–1986; 2012). Since 1989 he was a member of the Austrian PEN-Club. In 2005 he was elected a corresponding member of the German Academy of Language and Literature. He has been engaged politically, e.g. reporting on Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution in 1989, or in his critique of the new edition of Mein Kampf in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung in 2016 and the Open Letter he organised to the European Heads of State, also in 2016.

As a poet, he has been active on the literary scene since the 1960s, initially writing experimental poetry in the circle connected with the Poetry Society. He published alongside experimentalists like Bob Cobbing, Cris Cheek, Lawrence Upton and Bill Griffiths, bringing out over a dozen poetry books and pamphlets. He has been represented in numerous exhibitions, such as Sprachen jenseits von Dichtung (1979), [The Open and Closed Book] at the Victoria and Albert Museum and [Vom Aussehen der Woerter] at the Kunstmuseum Hannover, and in anthologies such as Typewriter Art (2014) and A Human Document (2014). This side of his work – poetry, drawings, artists’ books – is represented in many major collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), the Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel), the New York Public Library, the Sackner Archive (Florida), the Getty Museum (Los Angeles), the Special Collection, Maughan Library, King’s College London, the Staatsgalerie (Stuttgart), the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum (London) and Tate Britain. He held a retrospective of his drawings and concrete poems at the National Library of Czechoslovakia, Prague, in 1997. His novel The Magus of Portobello Road appeared in 2015. His second novel A Night at the Troubadour came out in 2017.

Since the 1980s he has regularly produced literary journalism, writing for The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The European and The New York Times as well as for the London Review of Books. He is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. His work has been translated into many languages, including French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, and Japanese.

Scholarly books, editions, translations

Poetry books, pamphlets, artist's books