Michael Augustin was born in Lübeck, on the Baltic Sea coast in Northern Germany, in 1953. He studied Anglo-Irish Literature and Folklore at University College Dublin and the University of Kiel. While still a student he was doing freelance work for Irish and German radio. He now lives in Bremen with his wife, Indian poet Sujata Bhatt. He works as a writer and broadcaster with Radio Bremen, where he hosts a fortnightly poetry programme and is the editor for the weekly radio documentary. He is co-directing Bremen’s International Literature Festival Poetry on the Road. An author of many volumes of poetry, mini drama and short prose, he has also published several audio books. His most recent collections, published in late 2014 and early 2015, are Denkmal für Baby Schiller (a collection of poems, prose miniatures and collages) and Schweini blutet – Deutschland tutet (a collection of football poems written during the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil). His poems, collages and drawings have appeared in literary magazines around the globe. Translations of his books have been published in Argentina, Venezuela, Poland, Ireland, England, Italy, Sweden, The Netherlands and Greece. Augustin himself has also worked as a translator of poetry and drama (Kenneth Koch, Adrian Mitchell, Pearse Hutchinson, John B. Keane, Peter Sheridan, Adrian Henri, Roger
McGough, Raymond Carver, Sujata Bhatt, Simon Gray, Matthew Sweeney). He has read at numerous international literature festivals (Dublin, Maastricht, Edinburgh, Vienna, Medellín, Caracas, Kuala Lumpur, Surabaya, Vilnius, Johannesburg, Harare,
Granada/Nicaragua and Mexico City) and is the recipient of the Friedrich-Hebbel-Prize and the Kurt-Magnus-Prize.
In 1984 he was a member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in the USA. In 2003/04 he was Max Kade Writer in Residence and Visiting Professor at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, and in 2006 he was Writer in Residence at the University of Bath in England. In 2009 he and his wife held a residency at the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island on the West Coast of Ireland. He is a member of both the German and the Irish P.E.N.