Für immer die Alpen. Benjamin Quaderer and Seán Williams in Discussion

Due to tube strikes across London on 4 October, this event will take place on Thursday, 5 October instead

Benjamin Quaderer reads from his widely acclaimed debut novel Für immer die Alpen. The reading will be followed by a Q&A with Seán Williams.

Quaderer is the most prominent young author to emerge from Liechtenstein, the Principality which is also the focus of this novel, ‘a crime drama about a data thief, which then turns into a global story of corruption in a nutshell’ (Seán Williams). Inspired by the case of the data thief – or whistleblower? – Heinrich Kieber and the 2008 tax scandal, Quaderer has written a story of international intrigue. But the book is also about the identity of a locality nestled between Austria and Switzerland. Quaderer’s inventive and unreliable narrator, Johann Kaiser, is equally fascinating as a clever and charming conman, perhaps reminiscent of Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull, and as a reflection of a society that produced and enabled him.

The event is moderated by Andrea Capovilla, Director of the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature & Culture at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (University of London).

Benjamin Quaderer was born in 1989 in Feldkirch, Austria, and grew up in Liechtenstein. He studied creative writing in Hildesheim and Vienna. Für immer die Alpen was awarded the Rauriser Literaturpreis, the Debütpreis der lit.Cologne as well as the  Uwe-Johnson-Förderpreis.

Dr Seán Williams is Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield, a journalist and broadcaster. He specialises in German and European Cultural History and covered the Principality of Liechtenstein for the Economist on the state's 300th anniversary.

Read a sample translation by Elisabeth Lauffer here. 

All welcome; advance online registration required. 

Image: Benjamin Quaderer © Jens Oellermann. Seán Williams © Marcello Cattaneo

This event is sponsored by the