Anne Duden was born in 1942 in Oldenburg, spent her early childhood in Berlin and Ilsenburg in the GDR, then returned westwards to Oldenburg where she went to school. Moving to Berlin, she trained as a bookseller, studied literature and sociology, had various jobs, then worked in publishing and was co-founder of the left-wing publishing house Rotbuch. Since 1978 she has divided her time between London and Berlin. Anne Duden's literary reputation was immediately established in 1982 with the publication of Übergang, an experimental sequence of loosely related short stories, to be followed in 1985 by her novel Das Judasschaf. Steinschlag, a sequence of poems in free rhythms, followed in 1993 to great critical acclaim, establishing Duden's literary reputation anew, this time as a poet. In 1995 she published a collection of mixed prose pieces and poems, Wimpertier, and a volume of essays, sketches and commentaries on painting, Der wunde Punkt im Alphabet. Further essays on poetics and on visual art have since appeared. Hingegend, a volume of poems, came out in 1999.

Duden's language is marked by a tension between cool precision and hallucinatory evocation of extreme states of mind and of physical anguish. In her work, subjective bodily and psychic states, painful acts of remembering and of telling take on metaphoric expansion of meaning to bear testimony to the history of the twentieth century and to the dark side of European culture. In a Romantic tradition of ironic reflection upon representation, Duden creates correspondences between literature and the visual arts, notably Renaissance painting, while hyper- or surrealist emotional intensity is combined with an analytic and essayistic vein. Anne Duden's most recent publication, an essay on the slightly surprising topic of Heimat, or rather on Heimaten, from this German author who lives in London, came out in 2001. At the Newcastle CUTG meeting Anne Duden will read a selection of poems and prose.