Martin Mosebach

Martin Mosebach, born in 1951 in Frankfurt, Germany, began a career in law. But shortly before taking his final examinations, he began work on his first book. Since 1983, he has published eleven novels as well as numerous short stories, poems, librettos, essays on art and literature, and travel writing. In addition, in his role as an independent-minded public intellectual, he has written books on religious, historical and political topics. His published works in English include The 21: A Journey into the Land of Coptic Martyrs (Plough, 2019); The Heresy of Formlessness (Angelico, 2018); and the novel What Was Before (Seagull, 2014).

In 2007, Mosebach was awarded the Germany’s most prestigious literary prize, the Georg Büchner Prize, for the way his work “combines gorgeousness of style with a primal joy in storytelling.” Other awards he has received include the Heinrich von Kleist Prize, the Grand Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, and the Goethe Plaque of the City of Frankfurt. Mosebach is a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature, the German Academy of Arts in Berlin-Brandenburg, and the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. He lives in Frankfurt.