Daniel Kehlmann


Daniel Kehlmann is a German-language novelist and playwright of both Austrian and German nationality. His novel Die Vermessung der Welt is the best-selling book in the German language since Patrick Süskind's Perfume was released in 1985. According to The New York Times, it was the world's second best-selling novel in 2006. All his subsequent novels reached the number one spot on Germany's Spiegel bestseller list and were translated into English. He collaborated with Jonathan Franzen and Paul Reitter on Franzen's 2013 book The Kraus Project. Kehlmann's play The Mentor, translated by Christopher Hampton, opened at Theatre Royal, Bath, in April 2017 starring F. Murray Abraham and transferred to the London West End in July 2017. In October 2017, his play Christmas Eve, also translated by Christopher Hampton, premiered at the Theatre Royal. His novella You Should Have Left was adapted into a movie starring Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried. Kehlmann's highly praised novel Tyll, which sold more than 600.000 copies in German alone and was published the US in February 2020, is currently being adapted into a TV series for Netflix by the makers of Dark.

Life and career

Kehlmann was born in Munich, the son of the television director Michael Kehlmann and the actress Dagmar Mettler. His family moved to his father's hometown Vienna at the age of six. Kehlmann is partially of Jewish ancestry and currently lives in New York City and Berlin.
Since 2015, Kehlmann has successively held the Eberhard Berent Chair at New York University. He is a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung.
2016-2017 he was a fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars.
The novel Tyll made it onto the shortlist of the International Booker Prize.
Kehlmann also works as a screenwriter and wrote the script for the TV film Das letzte Problem. He adapted Thomas Mann's novel Confessions of Felix Krull for an upcoming movie.

Awards and honors

Novels

Die Reise der Verlorenen was translated and adapted by Tom Stoppard for broadcast by BBC Radio in 2020 as The Voyage of the St. Louis. This dramatization included elements not found in the source material such as the involvement of Joseph Goebbels and a Nazi secret agent aboard the ship MS St. Louis in order to carry home a secret microfilm.

Books available in English