Michael Augustin was born in Lübeck, 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 RTE and German radio. He now lives in Bremen with his wife, Indian poet Sujata Bhatt, and their daughter Jenny.

Michael 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. An author of many volumes of poetry, mini-drama and short prose, he has also published several audio books. His poems and drawings have appeared in literary magazines around the globe. Translations of his books have been published in Argentina, Poland, Ireland, England, Italy and Greece. A substantial collection of his selected works, Mickle Makes Muckle,  appears in English translation , published by Dedalus Press this year.

He 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, Vienna, Medellín, Caracas, Kuala Lumpur and Makassar) and is the recipient of the Friedrich-Hebbel-Prize and the Kurt-Magnus-Prize. In 1984 he was a member of the International Writing Programme at the University of Iowa. 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.

Photograph by Pierce Bounds.