29^th Leukerbad International Literary Festival

Authors

Christian Kracht

Switzerland

Born in Saanen in 1969, Christian Kracht grew up in Switzerland, the United States, Canada. and southern France and has lived in Germany, India, Thailand, Nepal, the US, and probably Austria and Scotland as well—not exactly letting others know where he has become for him a kind of constant game of hide and seek. Kracht studied film, worked for a long time as journalist, edited the respected magazine Der Freund with Eckhart Nickel, and he writes film scripts. It is impressive how he reinvents himself with each new publication—he avoids classifications. Kracht’s books have been translated into thirty languages and have won numerous awards.
In Kracht’s most recent novel Air, the Swiss interior designer and decorator Paul accepts a strange but well-paid commission that takes him to Norway as well as into late antiquity, the ice age, and fabulous realms outside of time and space. Air is an escapist novel, of a linguistically pithy, timeless elegance that is especially unsettling when horrors are being recounted (and many horrors are recounted),” Adam Soboczynski writes in der Zeit. Typical for Kracht is the desire to ratchet up the oddity by two or three turns and perhaps also typical is the fact that there is surely no one meaning of this “commentary on a glutted world.” (Nina Kunz, SRF Literaturclub).

Air. 2025
Eurotrash. Translated into English by Daniel Bowles. 2024
The Dead. Translated into English by Daniel Bowles. 2018

Joshua Cohen wanted to travel from Israel, which is currently not possible. The ‘Perspectives’ discussion between Joshua Cohen and Christian Kracht unfortunately has to be canceled.

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