Thomas Melle

Thomas Melle at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2018

Thomas Melle (born March 17, 1975 in Bonn ) is a German writer and translator .

Life

Thomas Melle grew up in difficult circumstances in Bonn and attended the Aloisius College in Bad Godesberg until he graduated from high school. He then studied comparative literature and philosophy at the University of Tübingen , the University of Texas at Austin and the Free University of Berlin ; He completed this course in 2004 with a master's thesis on William T. Vollmann , which he also translated. He has lived in Berlin since 1997.

Melle is a writer of narrative works and plays , as well as translating from English . In 2006 he took part in the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition in Klagenfurt. In 2008 he received the Bremen Literature Prize and in 2009 the North Rhine-Westphalia Prize . Melle's Roman Sickster was nominated for the German Book Prize 2011. His novel 3000 Euro , published in 2014, was shortlisted for the German Book Prize in 2014 . The protagonists of the novel are a homeless person and bottle collector , from whom the bank is demanding 3,000 euros, and a cashier who shoots amateur porn. In this novel, the author had resolved to "oppose the bourgeois family novel". The reviews and the nomination proved him right.

His work Die Welt im Rück , published in August 2016 , in which Thomas Melle addresses his bipolar disorder , was again shortlisted for the German Book Prize. A dramatization of the work was in March 2017 by the Vienna Burgtheater to premiere brought. Jan Bosse staged it and Joachim Meyerhoff played it . An audio book version read by the author appeared in the same year.

In October 2018, the play Unheimliches Tal / Uncanny Valley , which Melle developed in collaboration with Stefan Kaegi from the Rimini Protokoll theater group, had its world premiere at the Münchner Kammerspiele . The sole actor there is a humanoid robot modeled on the author's exterior, who reflects on existential questions of identity and representation.

In the debate about the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Peter Handke in 2019, Melle criticized the style of the debate. "Twitter, which sets the pulse of opinion-making, simply prepares the content in this way, formats it into toxic scraps and smug nibbles." Alexander Cammann sees Melle's contribution as a sharp media criticism and the unmasking of the mechanisms of the young medium Twitter .

Quote

"Inside I'm racing, tragedy and comic in one, hulk and hubris, under this Frisian sea sky."

- Thomas Melle : The world behind you, p. 138

Awards

• 2008 sponsorship award for the Bremen literature award
• 2009 sponsorship award from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for young artists
• 2011 longlist at the German Book Prize with Sickster
• 2011 Franz Hessel Prize for Sickster ; together with the French author Celine Minard
• 2014 shortlist at the German Book Prize with 3000 euros
• 2015 Art Prize Berlin
• 2016 Invitation to the Mülheim Theater Days with pictures from us
• 2016 shortlist at the German Book Prize with the world behind
• 2016 place 1 on the SWR best list November with the world behind her
• 2017 Klopstock Prize for New Literature for the Back of the World
• 2017/2018 City Clerk of Bergen
• 2018 invitation to the Berlin Theatertreffen with the world behind you
• 2018 Honorary gift from the German Schiller Foundation
• 2018 invitation to the Mülheim Theater Days with transfer
• 2020 Invitation to the Mülheim Theater Days with an ode

Works

• Space claim . Stories. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-518-41879-6 .
• Sickster . Novel. Rowohlt Berlin, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-87134-719-1 .
• 3000 euros . Novel. Rowohlt Berlin, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-87134-777-1 .
• The world behind you . Rowohlt Berlin, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-87134-170-0 .

theatre

• Four million doors , (together with Martin Heckmanns ). Premiere: October 1st, 2004, Deutsches Theater Berlin .
• Haus zur Sonne , premiere: January 26th, 2006, Theater Erlangen .
• Licht frei Haus , Premiere: June 24th, 2007, Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe .
• Dirty Creation - Making of Frankenstein , Premiere: October 16, 2008, Theaterhaus Jena .
• One trillion dollars , adaptation of the novel of the same name by Andreas Eschbach . Premiere: September 25th, 2009, Wuppertaler Bühnen .
• The heart is a lousy prostitute , Premiere: February 25th 2010, Theaterhaus Jena.
• I'll build a house from your perspective, WP : March 22, 2013, Wuppertaler Bühnen, Kleines Schauspielhaus.
• Not nothing , premiere: June 6, 2014, Landestheater Tübingen .
• Royal Dramas I & II (Dreams and Ruins) , translation based on the Royal Dramas by William Shakespeare. Premiere: October 3, 2014, Schauspiel Bonn .
• Pictures of us , WP: January 21, 2016, Theater Bonn .
• Partner , WP: March 9, 2016, Theater Aachen .
• Ännie , Premiere : November 24th, 2016, Theater Bremen .
• Relocation , Premiere: November 17, 2017, Deutsches Theater Berlin .
• The Last Citizen , Premiere: January 25, 2018, Theater Bonn .
• Unheimliches Tal / Uncanny Valley , (together with Stefan Kaegi ( Rimini Protokoll )). Premiere: October 4th, 2018, Münchner Kammerspiele .
• Overwhelming , world premiere: July 12, 2019, Nibelungen Festival Worms , director: Lilja Rupprecht .
• King Lear , translation and adaptation after William Shakespeare. Premiere: September 28, 2019, Münchner Kammerspiele .
• Ode , world premiere: December 20, 2019, Deutsches Theater Berlin , director: Lilja Rupprecht .

Translations

• William T. Vollmann : Whores for Gloria . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 978-3-518-41747-8 .
• William T. Vollmann: Hobo Blues . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-518-42019-5 .
• Ben Marcus : Flame Alphabet . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-455-40370-1 .
• together with Gerhard Henschel : Ben Marcus: Go ashore . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-455-40336-7 .
• Tom Bullough: The Mechanics of Heaven . CH Beck, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-406-62998-3 .
• Christopher Isherwood : A Single Man . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-455-40501-9 .
• Rajeev Balasubramanyam: Starstruck . Novel. Fiction , Berlin 2014.
• Tom McCarthy : Satin Island . Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-421-04718-2 .

Web links

Commons : Thomas Melle  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Thomas Melle in the catalog of the German National Library
• Author page of the Rowohlt Verlag
• Thomas Melle in the Bergen-Enkheim town clerk archive

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Healed in the meantime . Article by Sandra Kegel in the FAZ of September 2, 2016
2. ↑ Bonn writer has made it onto the longlist for the second time. Retrieved September 5, 2014.
3. ↑ Thomas Melle: Sickster
4. ↑ https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/thomas-melle-kein-autor-fuer-leichte-loesungen.700.de.html?dram:article_id=302451
5. ↑ Thomas Melle No author for easy solutions , author portrait and review by Katrin Hillgruber on Deutschlandfunk from November 6, 2014, accessed November 10, 2014
6. ↑ Burgtheater (Vienna): The world behind you ( memento of the original from November 17, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Announcement of the world premiere, November 17, 2016.
7. ↑ Thomas Melle's play in Munich: Stay human, says Bernd Noack's machine on www.spiegel.de, October 5, 2018
8. ↑ Thomas Melle: Nobel Prize for Peter Handke: Clowns on the hunt . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed October 22, 2019]).
9. ↑ Alexander Cammann: Show trial with colored socks? The author Thomas Melle criticizes the style of the Handke debate. In: Die Zeit , October 24, 2019, p. 55. ( Online version ; accessed October 26, 2019)
10. ↑ German-French literature prize awarded . In: Saarbrücker Zeitung (Culture) of December 9, 2011, p. B4
11. ↑ Press release of the Berlin Academy of the Arts from January 15, 2015
12. ↑ Thomas Melle | Mülheimer Theatertage NRW - Plays | City of Mülheim an der Ruhr. In: www1.muelheim-ruhr.de. Retrieved September 21, 2016 . 
13. ↑ BuchMarkt Verlag K. Werner GmbH: The SWR best list November: Thomas Melle in first place | Book market. In: www.buchmarkt.de. Retrieved December 26, 2016 .