Michael Lentz is a German writer, poet, literary scholar, and musician. He was born in 1964 in Düren and studied German philology, history, and philosophy in Aachen and Munich. His study focused on phonetic poetry and music after 1945. He made his literary debut in 1985, at a public reading at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren. In 1998, he won the German Poetry Slam Championship. In 2001, he won the Ingeborg Bachmann for his story “Mother’s Death.” Since 2004 Lentz is President of the Freie Akademie der Künste in Leipzig, and since 2006 he is a professor of literary writing at the German Institute for Literature in Leipzig. Lentz was a co-editor of the literary magazine Neue Rundschau. Since 2014 he has been a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry in Darmstadt. He lives in Berlin and Leipzig.
