Klaus Cäsar Zehrer The Genius

Klaus Cäsar Zehrer’s debut The Genius has been on the Spiegel bestseller list for 17 weeks – and counting. In total we have sold 30'000 copies, and foreign rights to Serbia (Plato) and Hungary (Könyvmolykepző).

In terms of prizes, The Genius was on the shortlist of the Bavarian Book Prize – and it won this year’s blogger prize for debut novels ›Das Debüt‹ on 10 January (more information here).
Here are a few quotes from the jurors:
»… this book draws a great panorama of the 20th century: how life and work changed, how the science of diseases of the mind, psychology and psychoanalysis developed, as well as politics in the US.«
Nadine Henning

»Zehrer managed to entertain me, with a bizarre story and his own language. Furthermore, he made me think about […] my own life.«
Fabian Neidhardt

The press continues to praise The Genius – here are a few quotes from the latest articles:
»A transformative reading experience with simply ingenious traits.«
Wolfram Eilenberger / Philosophie Magazine, Berlin

»Zehrer performs Sidis’ fate in a credible and multi-faceted way as a tragic biography.«
Jens-Uwe Sommerschuh / Sächsische Zeitung, Dresden

»Zehrer’s dialogues develop with brilliant cogency.«
Stefan Candid Depenheuer / Nürnberger Zeitung

Tomi Ungerer Why Am I Not You?

Recently published in Italy by Feltrinelli.

Rights sold:
French (Ecole des Loisirs)
Italian (Feltrinelli)
Spanish (Blackie Books)
Polish (Format)
Catalan (Blackie Books)
Chinese/CN (Shanghai Dook)
Latvian (Janis Roze)

Spiegel 2017 hardcover fiction publisher ranking: Diogenes again in the top spot

Just like last year, Diogenes is # 1 on the fiction publisher hardcover ranking of the Spiegel bestseller list for the year 2017.

Eight of our titles contributed to this feat, most prominently, Martin Suter's Elefant. The book about the handbag-sized pink pachyderm made it to # 10 of the 2017 fiction hardcover ranking.

Four more titles of which we handle world rights made it to the all-year fiction hardcover ranking: Donna Leon’s Earthly Remains was # 29, Benedict Wells’ On the End of Loneliness # 37 (particularly outstanding after being released in 2016), Ingrid Noll’s Tally-Ho # 57 and Klaus Cäsar Zehrer’s debut The Genius # 85.

Erich Hackl was awarded the ›Prize of Human Rights‹ by the province of Upper Austria

In December, Erich Hackl was awarded the ›Prize of Human Rights‹ by the province of Upper Austria. The prize comes with an honorarium of 4’000 Euros.

According to the jury, Erich Hackl was awarded the prize because of his contribution to maintaining humanity and justice in society by remembering uncomfortable parts of history in his books. Erich Hackl’s novella Farewell Sidonia has become a standard work of reappraising Austria’s past during the Nazi period, and is therefore frequently read in schools.

Gems from our backlist: Peter Rüedi: Dürrenmatt or The Idea of the Whole

We congratulate our author Peter Rüedi on the occasion of his 75th birthday on January 15, 2018.

Peter Rüedi is ideally placed as a biographer because of his expertise: He worked with Friedrich Dürrenmatt, who was his first employer at Zürich’s Sonntags-Journal; regular and intense talks for the culture pages of the newspaper Weltwoche followed. As head dramaturg at Zürich’s Schauspielhaus he was co-responsible for staging Dürrenmatt’s last play Achterloo.

In contrast to authors who turn themselves and their lives into topics in their books, we don’t get to know Friedrich Dürrenmatt as a person when we read his works. Even in his autobiographic works called Materials Dürrenmatt filtered out everything intimate while writing. In a gripping and elegant way, Peter Rüedi tells of the life of the world-renowned author, of the history of his writing, from the beginnings until his breakthrough in 1956/58 with the play The Visit and the detective novel The Pledge – the decisive years that formed Dürrenmatt as an author: An author who reinvented himself and his art time and again.

We are happy to announce that the Chinese translation of Peter Rüedi’s biography will be published by Zhejiang University Press this year. The original of Dürrenmatt or The Idea of the Whole was published in January 2011, in time for Dürrenmatt’s 90th birthday. In 2021, only 3 short years away, Dürrenmatt will have turned a hundred years old.

Hans Werner Kettenbach

20.4.1928 – 5.1.2018

German author Hans Werner Kettenbach died on January 5, 2018 at the age of 89. Born on April 20, 1928 in Bendorf/Rhein, he passed away in Cologne.

With Hans Werner Kettenbach, we have lost »a masterful storyteller and one of Germany’s few world-class crime writers.« (Ulrich Baron/Rheinischer Merkur, Bonn)

For more information about Hans Werner Kettenbach and his work, please follow this link: Hans Werner Kettenbach.