Author Daniel Glattauer Turns 65 Years Old
His latest novel "In einem Zug" also topped the bestseller lists in Germany and Austria. "It's incredible that you can get through life so well with as little elbowing as I do!" he marvels at his career. On Monday (May 19), the Vienna-born ex-journalist will turn 65 years old.
Glattauer studied pedagogy and art history at the University of Vienna and wrote a dissertation on "The Problem of Evil and Its Educational Significance." As a journalist, he worked for the "Presse" and from 1989 for the daily newspaper "Der Standard," where he was active as a court reporter and columnist, among other roles. His annual Christmas feuilletons about his nephew Theo led to his first book in 1997: "Theo and the Rest of the World." This marked the beginning of a second career as an author, which became his main profession in 2009. He also gained an important insight, as he once shared in an APA interview: "I know that I can manage to make myself happy with my text, and that it usually also reaches its audience."
Daniel Glattauer: Successful Email Novels
His books include "Die Ameisenzählung," "Darum," "Der Weihnachtshund," "Ewig Dein," and the father-son novel "Geschenkt." The email novel "Gut gegen Nordwind" became a global success in 2006, followed by the sequel "Alle sieben Wellen" in 2009. Dramatizations (successfully premiered by Michael Kreihsl at the Kammerspiele of the Theater in der Josefstadt), a film adaptation, and a realization followed: "I am labeled as an entertainment writer," Glattauer noted the lack of appreciation for his work by literary critics. Given such high sales figures, not a significant problem: "I also find customer reviews by ordinary readers more sympathetic and insightful than newspaper reviews."
As a comedy writer, Glattauer, who lives with his wife Lisi in Vienna and Lower Austria, was also successful with the couple therapy piece "Die Wunderübung" (in which he incorporated his training as a psychosocial counselor in 2015 and which was also filmed) and the cultural industry satire "Vier Stern Stunden" (2018).
"Passion and Joy in Writing"
Privately, he is mainly involved in migration or social issues. In his play "Die Liebe Geld" (premiered by Folke Braband in 2020 at the Kammerspiele of the Theater in der Josefstadt), there was a fair amount of capitalism criticism, and in his novel "Die spürst du nicht" (2023), he transformed "the need to portray a burning issue like migration from a different perspective" into the description of a private tragedy, posing the question of whether it could have a cathartic effect.
For his new novel "In einem Zug," which was published in January and marked his transition from the Austrian Zsolnay Verlag to the German DuMont Buchverlag, he wanted to indulge in the "passion and joy of writing," he recounted. The main character is the bestselling author Eduard Brünhofer, who has reached millions with romance novels ("I am quite similar to my protagonist") and gets involved in a conversation with a fellow passenger on a train journey. "I put a person on a train, and then something happens," he described his recipe, which once again resulted in high sales figures.
(APA/Red)
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