Jürgen Becker
Becker in 2009
Born	(1932-07-10)10 July 1932 Cologne, Rhine Province, Prussia, Weimar Germany
Died	7 November 2024(2024-11-07) (aged 92) Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Occupation(s)	Poet, writer, radio play author
Spouse	Rango Bohne ​ ​ (m. 1965; died 2021)​
Children	1

Jürgen Becker (German pronunciation: [ˈjʏʁɡn̩ ˈbɛkɐ]; 10 July 1932 – 7 November 2024) was a German poet, prose writer and audio play author. He won the 2014 Georg Büchner Prize.

Becker was born in Cologne on 10 July 1932. His family moved from Cologne to Erfurt in 1939; he experienced the war as a child in Thuringia.^[1] In 1947, the family moved to Waldbröl in West Germany,^[2] and in 1950, back to Cologne. From 1950 to 1953, he attended a gymnasium there, completing with the Abitur.^[1] He began to study German studies, but broke off a year later.^[1][3]

From 1959 to 1964, Becker was a member of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, and from 1964 to 1966, literary editor in the Rowohlt publishing house.^[4] He became a freelance writer in 1968.^[5] From 1973, he was director of Suhrkamp Theater publishing, and from 1974 to 1993, director of the department for audio plays of Deutschlandfunk.^[1][6]

Becker emerged as a poet in the 1960s, with a highly experimental kind of literature in open form, in opposition to conventional narrative.^[7] In later texts, landscape plays an important role in his poetry.^[8] He also wrote stories and audio plays.^[9] Since 1994, his contributions have appeared in the journal Sinn und Form, edited by the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.^[10]

From 1960, Becker was a member of the Group 47,^[11] whose literary prize he won at the last meeting of the group in 1967.^[12] Since 1969, he was a member of the PEN Centre Germany and the Akademie der Künste, since 1974 also of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, since 1984 of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, and since 2009 of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts.^[13]

In 2012 a first documentary about him appeared, entitled "In Hell of Silence" The Author Jürgen Becker. Produced by Christoph Felder, the 80-minutes portrait featured him in interview and also short contributions by his colleagues Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson and Hans Magnus Enzensberger from Group 47.^[14]

Becker was married to the artist Rango Bohne from 1965, and lived in Odenthal near Cologne.^[15] Their son is the photographer and filmmaker Boris Becker [de].^[6][15] His wife died in 2021.^[15]

Becker died in Cologne on 7 November 2024, at the age of 92.^[16]

• Becker, Jürgen (1981). Häuser : Hörspiel. Stuttgart: Reclam. ISBN 978-3-15-009331-3.
• Becker, Jürgen (2015). Blackbirds in September : selected shorter poems. Pittsburgh, PA: Black Lawrence Press. ISBN 978-1-62557-938-6.

• 1965/66: Villa Massimo scholarship^[20]
• 1967: Prize of Group 47^[12]
• 1994: Peter-Huchel-Preis^[21]
• 1995: Heinrich-Böll-Preis^[22]
• 2001: Uwe Johnson Prize^[23]
• 2011: Thüringer Literaturpreis^[24]
• 2013: Günter Eich Prize [de]^[25]
• 2014: Georg Büchner Prize^[26]

Attribution

•  This article incorporates text available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license.