Jonas Lüscher


Jonas Lüscher is a Swiss writer, including of essays and novels, living in Germany.

Early life

Lüscher grew up in Bern, where he later trained between 1994 and 1998 at the Muristalden Evangelical Teacher Training School to qualify as a primary school teacher.

Career

He spent a few years as a script editor and screenwriter for the Munich film industry. He then undertook studies at the Munich School of Philosophy from 2005 to 2009, earning a master's degree in 2009. At the same time, he was working as a freelance editor.
From 2009 to 2001, Lüscher researched ethics in science at the TTN Institute at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
In 2011, Lüscher moved to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich . There, he embarked on a dissertation under the supervision of philosopher Michael Hampe on the work of Richard Rorty. In 2012–13, Lüscher was awarded a grant by the Swiss government enabling him to spend nine months as a visiting researcher in the Comparative Literature Department at Stanford University in California. At the end of 2014, Lüscher left ETH without completing his dissertation.
Lüscher is a member of the PEN Centre Germany, and began living in Munich in 2001.
His first novel, Frühling der Barbaren was nominated in 2013 for both the Swiss Book Prize and the German Book Prize.
In August 2025 his latest novel Verzauberte Vorbestimmung was placed on the longlist of the German Book Prize.

Selected works

Jetzt. Libretto for the opera by Mathis Nitschke, original production at the Opéra National de Montpellier, 30 November 2012.Frühling der Barbaren. Novella. C.H. Beck, Munich 2013. translated by Peter Lewis as Barbarian Spring, Haus Publishing, London 2014. Kraft. Novel. C.H. Beck, Munich 2017., longlisted for the 2017 German Book Prize. Translated by Tess Lewis as Kraft, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2020.
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Awards

Literature

  • Stefan Hofer-Krucker Valderrama: Die perpetuierte Katastrophe. Globalisierung und ihre Schattenseiten in Jonas Lüschers "Frühling der Barbaren". Mit einigen literaturdidaktischen Anmerkungen. In: Almut Hille, Sabine Jambon, Marita Meyer : Globalisierung – Natur – Zukunft erzählen. Aktuelle deutschsprachige Literatur für die Internationale Germanistik und das Fach Deutsch als Fremdsprache., Munich 2015, pp. 39–57.
  • Yvonne Hütter: . In: Primerjalna književnost, No. 40.2, 2017, pp. 149–163.