Rolf Lappert

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Rolf Lappert at the Leipzig Book Fair (2012)

Rolf Lappert (born December 21, 1958 in Zurich ) is a Swiss writer . In 2008 he became known to a broader audience in German-speaking countries with his novel Swimming home .

Live and act

Rolf Lappert grew up with a brother near Zofingen and in Olten . After leaving school, he trained as a graphic designer , but began writing short stories, novels and poems at the age of 20. He lived in France for a while and made many trips to Asia, the Caribbean and the USA. From 2000 he lived in the Irish city ​​of Listowel . He returned to Switzerland at the end of 2011.

work life

In the early 1980s, Rolf Lappert published his first novel, The Following Days (1982). This was followed in 1984 by the second novel Passer , with The Erotik der Hotelzimmer (1982) and Im Blickfeld des Schwers (1986) he published two volumes of poetry. He also wrote articles for anthologies , literary journals , newspapers and magazines.

In the meantime, Lappert interrupted writing to found a jazz club together with a friend in a former cinema in Aarburg . It was not until the mid-1990s that he presented another novel, The Heaven of Perfect Poets . In this, Lappert chooses a motel in the Arizona desert as the setting , in which four Italian poets spend a fellowship stay with drinking bouts in depressive melancholy and frighten the old and handicapped founder of the literary foundation with fictional brutal porn and horror stories about animal cruelty and child abuse. The novel, the first part of his American trilogy , was dominated by his predecessor Passer and presented the Swiss as a “storyteller on the surface” , in which his characters can only be grasped through the highly differentiated description of their activities.

A year later he received the Swiss Schiller Foundation Prize for his novel Die Gesänge der Losierer (1995) . In this, Lappert devoted himself to his great passion, music, and told the story of the London music journalist and rock band manager Tyler, who went to the south of the USA in search of a missing eccentric singer, where he found himself. The critics praised the work as "a novel written with great breath and a melancholy tone, which [...] would be included in the major American books of Swiss provenance from Frisch to Federspiel ".

In September 1996 he attended Charles Lewinsky’s sitcom writing seminar, which was financed by Swiss television , and then wrote the scripts for the 1997 series Mannezimmer . Conceived as a supplement to the established format Fascht e Familie , the successful series was about a turbulent male household. Lappert then worked as a screenwriter for Swiss television until 2004 and temporarily stopped work on the third volume of his American trilogy.

In 2008 Swimming Home was released . Lappert's fifth novel focuses on the short, 20-year-old American Wilbur Sandberg, who, after the death of his Irish mother and the departure of his Swedish father, has to endure a painful odyssey in children's homes and with foster parents before he is brought to Ireland by his grandparents . The story of the misfortune-torn, suicidal antihero represented the greatest success so far in Lappert's career, was celebrated by German-language critics and, thanks to its laconic tone and bizarre ideas, compared with works by well-known American authors such as John Irving . In 2008 home swimming was in the final of the German Book Prize together with five other works . A few weeks later the novel was awarded the first ever Swiss Book Prize.

His sixth novel, On the Islands of the Last Light, followed in August 2010 . In February 2012 he published his first book for young people , the novel Pampa-Blues , for which he received the 2013 Golden Leslie Prize for Young People . The novel Über den Winter , published in 2015, was again nominated for the German Book Prize, and Lappert once again made the shortlist of the six final nominations.

Works

Novels

Poetry

Youth books

Scripts

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eva Pfister: Entangled father search. In: Stuttgarter Zeitung , April 11, 2008, p. 38.
  2. ^ Corina Caduff : Autistic writing, fragile staged. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , March 4, 1994.
  3. ↑ Martin Allioth: Culture Notes . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , May 17, 1995, p. 47.
  4. ↑ Bernard Imhasly: In the whale belly of recovery. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , March 16, 1995, p. 47.
  5. ↑ About the dream of writing a sitcom for SF DRS. In: Basler Zeitung , January 3, 2001.
  6. ↑ Roger Anderegg: Even a male flat share is almost a family. In: SonntagsZeitung , August 24, 1997, p. 55.
  7. ↑ Rainer Moritz : Wilbur wants to kill himself. In: Die Welt , June 28, 2008, Literary World, p. 4.
  8. ↑ Roman Bucheli: From one end of the world to the other. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , August 17, 2010.
personal data
SURNAME Lappert, Rolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 21, 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH Zurich