Wolfgang Herrndorf


Wolfgang Herrndorf was a German author, painter, and illustrator.
WWW wolfgang-herrndorf.de

Life and career

His debut novel In Plüschgewittern was published by Zweitausendeins in 2001. Despite the protagonist's age of approximately 30 years, Herrndorf describes the book as a youth novel. Critics called it a pop novel. A reworked version of In Plüschgewittern was published by Rowohlt in 2008. The Eichborn Verlag published a collection of his interconnected short stories as Diesseits des Van-Allen-Gürtels in 2007. A fictional interview between Herrndorf and an untrustworthy Cosmonaut, with many traces of science- fiction, was released the same year, by SuKuLTuR-Verlag: Unreliable narrators are a recurring element in Herrndorf's fiction, which is attributed to the influence of Vladimir Nabokov.
His critically and commercially biggest success was the novel Tschick, a bildungsroman about two fourteen-year-old boys. The book was featured on the German list of bestselling books for over a year. He published his next novel Sand in November 2011. The novel contains elements of crime fiction, society novels and historical novels. Herrndorf quipped, the novel could belong to the genre of the "Trottelroman". Sand won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2012, ‘’Tschick’’ was nominated for the same prize the year before. Herrndorf's friend Robert Koall accepted the prize in Herrndorf's stead. Sand also made it to the shortlist of the German Book Prize.
Herrndorf, who lived in Berlin, regularly wrote in the web forum "Wir höflichen Paparazzi", which is acknowledged to have had a strong influence on Herrndorf and worked as a space for resonance. He also contributed to "Riesenmaschine". He was a member of the national authors football team "Autonama". After being diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour in February 2010, he began a digital diary called "das Blog Arbeit und Struktur" in which he reports about his deadly illness. It was posthumously published in December 2013 by Rowohlt in book form, as the author had requested.
On 26 August 2013 Herrndorf committed suicide in Berlin. He was interred at the Dorotheenstadt cemetery in Berlin. In 2014 Rowohlt published the sequel of Tschick from Isa's point of view as an unfinished novel with the title Bilder deiner großen Liebe. The epilogue by Kathrin Passig and Marcus Gärtner states that Herrndorf himself approved the release and determined the title. The book was first performed as a play in 2015 at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden, directed by Jan Gehlers.

Novels

Nonfiction

  • 2013 – ''''

Other works

  • 1998 – with Jürgen Roth: Heribert Faßbender – Gesammelte Werke. Band IX/5: Europameisterschaft 1996, Italien–Deutschland.
  • 2007 – Diesseits des Van-Allen-Gürtels
  • 2007 – Die Rosenbaum-Doktrin
  • 2018: ''Stimmen. Texte, die bleiben sollten''

Exhibitions

Awards