Ulrike Draesner is the first writer in residence associated with New College, TORCH and Mediating Modern Poetry. She is in Oxford for the academic year 2016. She was born in 1962 in Munich and has been living in Berlin since 1996. She studied English literature, philosophy and German literature in Munich and Oxford (St John’s College, Balliol College) and was awarded her Ph.D. in 1992. She is a poet, a writer of long and short fiction and a translator of French and Anglo-American poetry. Apart from numerous appearances in anthologies and magazines, she has published five poetry collections: gedächtnisschleifen / memory’s loops 1995, für die nacht geheuerte zellen/cells hired for a night 2001, kugelblitz / ball lightning 2005, berührte orte / touched places 2008 and subsong 2015 ans well as radical transaltions of Shakespeare's sonnets Twin Spin. Draesner also works as an author of essays on media and cultural change. Her multimedia collaborations include a space poem for Hong Kong and Calcutta, participation in various internet projects and SMS and video experiments. She has been awarded poetic readerships at the Universities of Kiel, Birmingham, Mainz and Bamberg, which were published as Zauber im Zoo / Magic in the Zoo in spring 2007, and sometimes teaches as a professor for Creative Writing at the Deutsche Literaturinstitut Leipzig. For her poetry and prose she received various scholarships (Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, Stiftung Schloss Solitude, Künstlerhaus Edenkoben, Passa Porta Brussels, among others) and literary awards, most recently the Annette-von-Droste-Hülshoff-Preis 2006, the Literaturpreis Solothurn 2010, the Roswithapreis 2013 and the Joachim-Ringelnatz-Preis for poetry 2014.