HERRNDORF – A Biography

Wolfgang Herrndorf is one of the most important writers of his generation. With his novel Tschick, he won fans all over the world, and his early death – his cancer diagnosis, and his decision to end his own life – is a tragedy which still moves many people to this day.
In this biography, Tobias Rüther tells us who Wolfgang Herrndorf really was. He follows Herrndorf from his childhood in Norderstedt, to Nuremberg where he studied art, and then to Berlin. He describes Herrndorf’s final years living with his illness, when he wrote his novels Sand and Bilder deiner großen Liebe and recorded his experiences on his blog “Arbeit und Struktur”, a unique chronicle of his life and writing. Based on numerous unpublished documents and conversations with family, friends and companions, Rüther illustrates the many different facets of Herrndorf’s life, including the lesser-known ones: he shows us the artist who loved astrophysics, Dutch painting, football, Nabokov and Stendhal; the perfectionist, the romantic, the MacBook enthusiast, the talented painter and the Titanic illustrator. What emerges is a fascinating and moving portrait of an extraordinary man who, despite the short time left to him, created a great body of work – and maintained control over his own life right to the end.