John Lanchester

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John Lanchester at the Leipzig Book Fair 2013

John Lanchester (born February 25, 1962 in Hamburg ) is a British writer who was awarded numerous literary prizes such as the Hawthornden Prize and the Whitbread Book Award for the best debut novel for his debut novel The Debt to Pleasure , published in 1996 . In Germany Lanchester succeeded 2012 breakthrough with the Roman capital (English Capital ), a book about life in the big city in the times of financial crisis.

Life

Lanchester grew in the Far East and was trained in England as an editor at the publishing house Penguin Books worked before he became a member of the editorial board of the London Review of Books was. He has also worked for numerous newspapers and magazines such as Granta and The New Yorker , as a restaurant critic for The Observer and a columnist for The Daily Telegraph .

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In 1996 Lanchester published his widely acclaimed debut novel The Debt to Pleasure , an unorthodox and educated autobiography by the creepy gourmet "Tarquin Winot". For this he received several literary prizes : the Whitbread Book Award for the best debut novel, the Hawthornden Prize , the Betty Trask Prize and the Julia Child Award. The book has been translated into twenty languages , into German by Melanie Walz .

His second book, the novel Mr Phillips (2000), is an internal monologue that tells the thoughts and fantasies of an unemployed fifty-year-old accountant. The Hong Kong novel Fragrant Harbor (2002) was nominated for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize .

Furthermore, the autobiographical book Family Romance (2007) and in March 2013 "Why everyone owes everyone something and nobody ever pays back", a description of the financial crisis from 2007 onwards (2010: Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay) was published ).

The novel Kapital (Orlando Books 2012) describes in episodes the thoughts and lives of the residents of London over a few months in 2007 and 2008, shortly before the banking crisis after the Lehman bankruptcy. The contemporary moral painting encompasses the whole spectrum of society: from the wealthy London City banker family to the Pakistani shopkeeper family, an African professional footballer, a successful concept artist, a Polish all-round builder, a Hungarian nanny and a boy who fled the Mugabe regime Woman from Zimbabwe who struggles as a policewoman. The panorama is held together by Pepys Road, with which everyone is connected. From the literary source of the 680-page novel, the BBC made a three-part mini-series, which was first broadcast by BBC 1 in 2015. The German first broadcast took place on Arte on April 20, 2017.

At the beginning of 2019, the dystopian novel The Wall was published in England, which , after a successful Brexit, paints a walled-in new reality for the UK with grim humor and acumen. After a climate catastrophe has occurred, the country is sealed off from the rest of the world behind a 10,000 kilometer long wall, while climate refugees are euthanized or enslaved.

Publications

In German language
  • The pleasure and its price. Notes of a traveling gentleman , original title The Debt to Pleasure , 1996. 2nd edition, Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna Munich 1996, ISBN 3-552-04803-0 .
  • Mr. Phillips from 6 to 7 , original title Mr Phillips , 2002, ISBN 3-552-05185-6 .
  • Hotel Empire, Hong Kong , original title Fragrant Harbor , 2004, ISBN 3-552-05324-7 .
  • Capital , novel, translated into German by Dorothee Merkel , original title Capital , 2012. 5th edition, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2012, ISBN 978-3-608-93985-9 .
  • Why everyone owes everyone something and no one ever pays back: The bizarre history of finance , original title Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay , 2010. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-608-94747-2 .
  • The language of money and why we (shouldn't) understand it , original title How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say - And What It Really Means , 2014. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2015, ISBN 978-3-608-94899 -8 .
  • Die Mauer , 348 p., From the English by Dorothee Merkel, Klett-Cotta Verlag , Stuttgart 2019, ISBN 978-3-608-96391-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Book reviews in the London Review of Books
  2. ^ A Critic at Large. Incredible edibles. The mad genius of "Modernist Cuisine." (THE NEW YORKER, March 21, 2011)
  3. ↑ THE GUARDIAN: Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester. Howard Davies joins John Lanchester for a tour of the global banking crisis (Book review, January 23, 2010)
  4. ↑ THE INDEPENDENT: Whoops !, By John Lanchester (book review, January 29, 2010)
  5. ↑ Capital by John Lanchester - review , The Guardian, February 24, 2012, accessed January 25, 2019
  6. ↑ Capital, By John Lanchester , reviewed in The Independent February 17, 2012, accessed January 25, 2019
  7. ↑ The Wall by John Lanchester review - dystopian fable for our time , review in: The Guardian , published and accessed January 15, 2019
  8. ↑ John Lanchester: "The Wall": Climate change as a dark dystopia , interview on the book with the author in Deutschlandfunk Kultur on February 4, 2019, accessed February 9, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Lanchester, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 25, 1962
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg