The writer, poet and radio play author died on Thursday at the age of 92 in his home in Cologne, as the Suhrkamp publishing house announced.
Jürgen Becker received numerous literary awards throughout his life, including the Georg Büchner Prize in 2014. The statement at the time stated that Becker was “an authoritative voice in contemporary poetry” and that he had influenced German poetry “for generations decisively shaped”.
Becker did that until the end. It was only this summer that his book with poems from 2022 and 2023 was published under the title “Nachspielzeit. Sentences and Poems” published by Suhrkamp.
Becker was born in Cologne in 1932, but just a few years later the family moved to Erfurt. During these years his parents separated and his mother died. In 1947 the family moved to North Rhine-Westphalia and in 1950 they returned to Cologne. Becker graduated from high school there a few years later. He dropped out of studying German. Before he became a freelance writer at the end of the 1960s, he worked for Westdeutscher Rundfunk and Rowohlt Verlag. He later became head of the Suhrkamp theater publishing house and head of the radio play department at Deutschlandfunk.
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