RAINER MALKOWSKI's DESIRE TO write poetry was long eclipsed by his involvement in the business world. Born in Berlin in 1939, he had the ambition to be a writer throughout his childhood and his years at the Gymnasium there. But he admits that he became “troubled because my ability to view my works critically was far better than my ability to write in a way that met my critical demands.” He also wanted to live independently “and of course needed money for that.”

From 1959 till 1971 he held numerous positions with newspaper publishers and advertising agencies, including that of creative director in the German office of the American advertising firm Young and Rubicam and, from 1967 on, of co-owner of Germany's largest advertising agency. This brought about some travel through Germany, leading him to Frankfurt in 1961 and Düsseldorf in 1967.

“I left my company,” Malkowski says, “because I was becoming increasingly ill at ease with the business world and because my desire to write was growing too strong to ignore. A day came when I no longer worried about what might happen if I gave up my regular income; I just wanted the freedom to write.”

After his change of career Malkowski moved to Brannenburg, a small town near Munich, to try his hand at freelance writing. “At that point,” he says, “I didn't have a stack of manuscripts lying around.”

Numerous publications in newspapers and magazines, as well as radio broadcasts of Malkowski's work, resulted in his first poetry volume, Was für ein Morgen, published by Suhrkamp in 1975. The book was called “the poetry discovery of the year” and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung claimed that “anyone who wants to list the essential lyricists now in middle age will not get by any longer without naming Rainer Malkowski.” In 1976 he received the Förderpreis des Bayerischen Staates, the first in a series of several prices and fellowships awarded to Malkowski.

Between 1977 and his current Oberlin College residence, Malkowski has produced three further volumes of poetry and a children's book and has edited two anthologies. He received the Leonce-und-Lena-Preis für Lyrik in 1997 and the Villa-Massimo-Stipendium, which enabled him to study in Rome for a year. A similar fellowship last year from the Stiftung für deutsch-holländischen Schriftsteller-Austausch enabled him to work in Amsterdam.