Three Suhrkamp Novels Shortlisted for the German Book Prize 2017

Robert Menasse was born in Vienna in 1954. He studied German philology, philosophy and political science in Vienna, Salzburg and Messina and received his PhD in 1980 with a thesis on the character of the outsider in literature. Menasse then spent six years at the University of São Paulo, first as a lecturer for Austrian literature, then as a guest lecturer at the Institute for Literary Theory, where he gave lectures on philosophical and aesthetic theories, including on Hegel, Lukács, Benjamin and Adorno. Since his return from Brazil in 1988, Robert Menasse has been a writer and essayist based mainly in Vienna.

Sasha Salzmann was born in Volgograd in 1985 and grew up in Moscow. In 1995, the family emigrated to Germany. In 2017, Salzmann published the novel Außer sich, which has been translated into 15 languages and received numerous prizes and accolades. Their latest novel, Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein, was longlisted for the German Book Prize 2021. In 2022, Salzmann received the prestigious Hermann-Hesse-Literaturpreis.