Kurt Drawert, born in 1956 in Hennigsdorf (Brandenburg), has lived as a freelance writer of poetry, prose, drama, and essays in Darmstadt since 1996, where he also heads the Center for Youth Literature. He has most recently published the monograph Schreiben. Vom Leben der Texte (Writing. On the Life of Texts) (2012), Was gewesen sein wird. Essays 2004–2014 (What Will Have Been. Essays 2004–2014) (2015), the poem Der Körper meiner Zeit (The Body of My Time) (2017) and the novel Dresden. Die zweite Zeit (Dresden. The Second Period) (2020), all with C. H. Beck in Munich. He has received numerous awards, including the Leonce and Lena Prize (1989), Meran Poetry Prize (1993), Ingeborg Bachmann Prize (1993), Uwe Johnson Prize (1994), Villa Massimo Residency (1995), Nikolaus Lenau Prize (1996), Rainer Malkowski Prize (2008), Werner Bergengruen Prize (2013), Robert Gernhardt Prize (2014), Lessing Prize of the Free State of Saxony (2017) and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Prize (2020). He is a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry (since 2014) and the Saxon Academy of the Arts (since 2018).
 
Kurt Drawert was a resident at Tarabya Cultural Academy from March to November 2014 and May to June 2015.