photo © Ulrike Arnold

Jonas Lüscher [Switzerland]

Jonas Lüscher is a German and Swiss writer born in 1976 in Zürich. For a few years, he worked as a dramaturge and story developer in the German film industry and studied from 2005 to 2009 at the Hochschule für Philosophie in Munich. At the same time, he worked as a freelance editor and later became a research associate for two years at the Institute of Technology – Theology – Natural Sciences at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. He also worked as a teacher in ethics at the Staatliche Wirtschaftsschule München/Pasing. In 2011, Lüscher began writing his dissertation at the ETH Zurich and then went to Stanford with a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. His first novella Frühling der Barbaren (2013; tr: Barbarian Spring), was nominated for the German and Swiss Book Prizes and received numerous accolades. In 2017, Lüscher published his first novel Kraft for which he won the Swiss Book Prize and the prestigious Toucan Prize. The prose of Lüscher has been acclaimed for its pertinence and relevance, framing the big questions of politics and society in a compelling literary way, approaching current issues such as globalization, ideology and populism from different perspectives. In addition to his literary works, Lüscher frequently publishes political and philosophical essays in magazines, newspapers and anthologies. He also wrote the libretto for the opera Jetzt by Mathis Nitschke (world premiere 2012; tr: Now). In 2022, he received the Max Frisch Prize from the city of Zürich for his work.Jonas Lüscher lives in Munich.