Hulse was educated locally in
Stoke-on-Trent until the age of sixteen, when his family moved to Germany. From 1973 to 1977 he studied at the
University of St Andrews, where he graduated with a first-class M.A. Hons in German. From 1977 to 1979 he taught at the
University of Erlangen, and from 1981 to 1983 at the
Catholic University of Eichstätt, dividing the intervening period between England and
South East Asia. Following two years in
Durham and
Oxford (1983–85) he returned to Germany, where he chiefly worked freelance in
Cologne for
Deutsche Welle television and in publishing (1985–2002). Most of his work as translator, both of German literature, including works by
W. G. Sebald,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Rainer Maria Rilke,
Elfriede Jelinek, and
Jakob Wassermann, and of
art criticism, belongs to these years, and he was general editor of the Könemann literature classics series. In this period he also lectured and led workshops and seminars at universities, sometimes for the
British Council, and from 1999 to 2002 led a four-year translation project in
Ethiopia for the
Goethe Institut. For two years (1999–2000) he co-edited the literary quarterly
Stand with
John Kinsella, and from 2001 to 2004 he was co-director with David Hartnett of the small press
Leviathan Press and editor of
Leviathan Quarterly. Since 2002 Hulse has taught poetry and comparative literature at the
University of Warwick, where in 2007 he established
The Warwick Review, a quarterly magazine of international writing, of which
Sean O'Brien wrote: "in scope and seriousness it offers a useful model for a contemporary literary-cultural magazine [...] Curiosity, imagination and readiness to encounter the unfamiliar are qualities
The Warwick Review asks of the reader, and in turn does much to embody" (
Times Literary Supplement, 30 October 2009). In 2007 he co-organized with Warwick colleague Eileen John a major international conference on poetry and philosophy at which the guest poets were
Geoffrey Hill (UK);
Jorie Graham, Susan Stewart and
John Koethe (US);
Robert Bringhurst and
Jan Zwicky (Canada); and Robert Gray and Kevin Hart (Australia). With Donald Singer, Professor of Clinical Pharmacology at Warwick, he established the Hippocrates initiative in 2009, which awards the annual Hippocrates Prize for poetry on a medical subject and convenes an annual international symposium. In 2011 the initiative won a Times Higher Education Award for Excellence and Innovation in the Arts. == Poetry ==