Peter Filkins, Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, has been awarded a 2022-2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in Biography and a Spring 2023 Fulbright IFK Senior Fellowship in Cultural Studies in support of his writing a biography of Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), one of the most important Austrian writers and poets of the 20th century. Nearly 40 years after Filkins was awarded a student Fulbright in 1983-84 to translate Bachmann’s poems, he will return to do research in her archive at the National Library in Vienna, Austria.
Over the course of the next academic year, Filkins will spend seven months in Vienna, part of which he will be in residence at the IFK International Research Center for Cultural Studies. The focus of his research will be on Bachmann’s unpublished writings and correspondence. At the conclusion of his residence, and as part of the Fulbright, Filkins will deliver a lecture about translating archival materials into a written text, such as a biography.
Filkins’ biography of Ingeborg Bachmann will be published by Yale University Press. He plans to complete it in time for Bachmann’s centenary, which is in 2026. In 2007, Filkins published a bi-lingual translation of Bachmann’s collected poems, Darkness Spoken, which remains the most complete edition of her poems available in English or in German. He is also the author of the 2019 biography, H.G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds.
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