The decades following the Second World War saw German literary culture undertake a careful, sometimes painful reconstruction of its own voice — a process that demanded not only writers but the editors, translators, and critics who could hold a fractured tradition together. Michael Krüger, born on December 9, 1943, in Germany, became one of the figures who worked across several of those roles at once.

Writing in German, Krüger has pursued an unusually wide range of activity: poet, writer, translator, librettist, critic, opinion journalist, linguist, and publisher. That breadth sets him apart from those who confined themselves to a single mode. As a publisher he operated within the same literary culture he was also shaping as a writer and poet; as a translator he carried work across languages; as a critic and opinion journalist he remained engaged with the written word in its most immediate, responsive forms. The roles reinforced and complicated each other in ways that a more narrowly defined career would not have permitted.

The honors Krüger has received reflect the range of that work. He was awarded the Peter-Huchel-Preis and the Rome Prize of the German Academy Villa Massimo, as well as the Joseph-Breitbach-Preis, the Erich Fried Prize, the Toucan Prize, and the Prix Médicis étranger. The state recognized his contributions with both the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art — an acknowledgment, at the highest civic level, of work conducted simultaneously across poetry, publishing, translation, and criticism.