Heinz Czechowski Add a review

Heinz Czechowski (7 February 1935 – 21 October 2009) was a German poet and dramatist.

At the age of ten, Czechowski survived the highly destructive bombing of his birthplace of Dresden. After training in surveying and graphic design, he studied at the Johannes R. Becher Institute of Literature in Leipzig, where he was strongly influenced by Georg Maurer and the Saxon school. His first published poems appeared in 1957 in an issue of Neue Deutsche Literatur. From 1961 to 1965, he worked at the Mitteldeutscher Verlag publishing house in Halle, Saxony-Anhalt. Between 1971 and 1973, he wrote plays for the city of Magdeburg, after which he became a freelance writer.

Czechowski produced free translations of the work of foreign poets (e.g. Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Lermontov, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Yiannis Ritsos). He was a founding member of the Leipzig Free Academy of the Arts.