© Jens Rusch
Sarah Kirsch was born as Ingrid Bernstein in 1935 in Limlingerode. In 1960 she married the poet Rainer Kirsch and began to publish lyrical texts under the pseudonym, Sarah. She wrote her first volume of poems with her husband, her own first volume of poems followed in 1967. After her divorce in 1968 she moved to East Berlin and became a board member in the Writers’ Association of the GDR. When she was excluded from the SED in 1976 she went to West Germany, where she continued her writing career very successfully. She has received numerous well-known awards and has been a member of the Free Academy of Arts in Hamburg since 1992. In 1996 she took on the Brothers Grimm Professorship in Kassel. Since 1983 Sarah Kirsch has lived in Tielenhemme in Schleswig-Holstein.
