Karen Leeder is a writer, scholar, and translator of contemporary German literature. She has received many accolades for her translations, including the Stephen Spender Prize for Childhood in the Diorama by Durs Grünbein, the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation for Grünbein’s The Doctrine of Photography, and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for Grünbein’s Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of My City. Her work has also been recognized with an American PEN/Heim award for her translation of Ulrike Almut Sandig’s Thick of It and a second Schlegel-Tieck Prize for All Under One Roof by Evelyn Schlag, among other honours. Leeder is the Schwarz-Taylor Chair of the German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. In 2023, she began a three-year Einstein Fellowship at the Free University of Berlin for her project AfterWords.
