Ralf Rothmann: 70th Birthday on May 10, 2023

»With his powerful poetics, Ralf Rothmann is one of the most important German-language authors and he is possibly the most sensitive narrator of his generation.«

On May 10, 2023, Ralf Rothmann celebrates his 70th birthday.

Rothmann was born in Schleswig in 1953 and grew up in the Ruhr region. After finishing school, he became a bricklayer’s apprentice, worked first in construction for a few years and afterwards in various other professions, including printer, nurse and chef. Rothmann has been living in Berlin since 1976.

With works such as Stier (1991), Milch und Kohle (2000), Hitze (2003) and Junges Licht (2004), Rothman established himself as one of Germany’s preeminent post-war writers, loved by readers and critics alike.

He has been awarded numerous prizes for his works, including the Heinrich-Böll-Preis 2005, the Max-Frisch-Preis 2006, the Kleist-Preis 2017, the Premio San Clemente 2018 (Spain) and most recently the Thomas-Mann-Preis 2023. His best-selling trilogy on World War II and the post-war years in Germany, consisting of Im Frühling sterben (HWA Gold Crown for Historical Fiction (UK) 2018), Der Gott jenes Sommers (Uwe-Johnson-Preis 2018) and Die Nacht unterm Schnee, has been met with great critical acclaim and widely translated.
 

Most recently, Suhrkamp Verlag published Theorie des Regens, a collection of Rothmann’s notes from fifty years of working as a writer.

We congratulate our author on this joyous occasion.
 

»All of Rothmann’s novels are challenging, both stylistically and morally,
but even so, they don’t shy away from pathos and it’s this combination that makes […] the author solitary, a lonely master of contemporary literature.«
Adam Soboczynski, Die Zeit