Jeremy Adler


Jeremy Adler is a British scholar and poet, and emeritus professor and senior research fellow at King's College London. As a poet he is known especially for his concrete poetry and artist's books. As an academic he is known for his work on German literature specialising in the Age of Goethe, Romanticism, Expressionism and Modernism with contributions on figures such as Goethe, Hölderlin, and Kafka.

Education

He was born in London in 1947, the son of poet and Holocaust survivor H. G. Adler, and was educated at St Marylebone Grammar School and Queen Mary College London, where he graduated with a first class degree in German with English. He studied for a PhD at Westfield College London, obtaining his degree in 1978 with a thesis on the chemistry of German polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Elective Affinities under Claus Bock.

Career

He was a lecturer in German at Westfield College London and was awarded a personal chair at Queen Mary and Westfield College London. He was professor of German and head of department at King’s College London.
He was a council member of the Poetry Society and a member of the Bielefeld Colloquium für neue Poesie. He was awarded the Goethe Prize of the English Goethe Society and a Stipend of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. He was a joint honorary secretary of the English Goethe Society and a council member of the International Goethe Society. For ten years he was founding chairman of the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust. He was a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin. Since 1989 he was a member of the Austrian PEN-Club. In 2005 he was elected a corresponding member of the German Academy of Language and Literature. He has been engaged politically, e.g. reporting on Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution in 1989, or in his critique of the new edition of Mein Kampf in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung in 2016 and the Open Letter he organised to the European Heads of State, also in 2016. He has written widely on Brexit and the future of Europe in the German-speaking press.
As a poet, he has been active on the literary scene since the 1960s, initially writing experimental poetry in the circle connected with the Poetry Society. He published alongside experimentalists like Bob Cobbing, Cris Cheek, Lawrence Upton and Bill Griffiths, bringing out over a dozen poetry books and pamphlets. He has been represented in numerous exhibitions, such as Sprachen jenseits von Dichtung, ' at the Victoria and Albert Museum and ' at the Kunstmuseum Hannover, and in anthologies such as Typewriter Art and A Human Document. This side of his work – poetry, drawings, artists' books – is represented in many major collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Herzog August Bibliothek, the New York Public Library, the Sackner Archive, the Getty Museum, the Special Collection, Maughan Library, King's College London, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum and Tate Britain. He held a retrospective of his drawings and concrete poems at the National Library of Czechoslovakia, Prague, in 1997. Poems of his have been set to music by Gerhard Lampersberg and Wolfgang Florey. His translations of poems by August Stramm have also been set to music by Michael Nyman in War Works. His novel The Magus of Portobello Road appeared in 2015. His second novel A Night at the Troubadour came out in 2017.
Since the 1980s he has regularly produced literary journalism, writing for The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The European and The New York Times as well as for the London Review of Books. He is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. His work has been translated into French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Turkish, and Japanese.
Adler received an Honorary Silver Medal of Jan Masaryk at the Czech Republic Ambassador's residence in London in November 2019.

Scholarly books, editions, translations