Christopher Middleton is a poet and translator, especially of German literature. He was born in Truro, Cornwall, in 1926. He studied at Merton College, Oxford, then held academic positions at the University of Zürich and King's College London. He became Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin, retiring in 1998. Middleton has published translations of Robert Walser, Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Goethe, Gert Hofmann and many others. He has received various awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize.