Urs Mannhart
Switzerland
Urs Mannhart, born in 1975, is a man of many talents: he has worked as a bicycle courier, a night watchman at an asylum centre and a poet. Since 2018, he has been a qualified organic farmer; he works on an organic farm near La Chaux-de-Fonds. As a traveller and reporter, Mannhart practises literary journalism – often with the photographer Beat Schweizer and for the magazine Reportagen. In his novels, he focuses on the challenges our era poses to the Earth’s ecological system and to the minds and bodies of its inhabitants – both human and animal. Thoroughly researched, linguistically polished, at times featuring grotesque imagery, yet always deeply empathetic.
At the festival he will read for the first time from a typescript whose narrative seems to him to be “highly unstable, which, given that these are lines that can presumably be described as non-fiction, may well be inherent in their nature”.
Urs Mannhart has already demonstrated in previous years that cycling is a perfectly suitable way to get to the Leukerbad Literature Festival. To mark the festival’s anniversary, he will be taking fellow enthusiasts on the first literary cycle tour on the Thursday before the festival – a collaboration with Reportagen.
31st Leukerbad International Literary Festival:
