Daniel Kehlmann

Daniel Kehlmann is a German-Austrian writer, whose novels and plays have won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Doderer Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. His novel Tyll was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, and Measuring the World has been translated into more than forty languages and is one of the biggest successes in post-war German literature.

Kehlmann’s new book, The Director, is a visionary tale inspired by the life of film director G.W. Pabst, who fled to Hollywood to resist the Nazis only to be forced to return to his homeland and create propaganda films for the German Reich. Hailed as “an incomparably accomplished and inventive piece of fiction by one of the most intelligent novelists at work today” by Jeffrey Eugenides, this novel explores the complicated relationships and distinctions between art and power, beauty and barbarism, cog and conspirator. Some of his other famous works include two plays, Christmas Event and The Mentor, as well as novels Tyll, F, You Should Have Left, Fame, Me and Kaminski, and Measuring the World.

Kehlmann has held the Eberhard Berent Chair at New York University. He is a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (The German Academy for Language and Literature). From 2016–2017 he was a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars. Kehlmann also works as a screenwriter and wrote the script for Next Door in 2021, which ran in Competition at Berlinale and the TV show KAFKA, which is currently streaming in the US on Chaiflicks. He adapted Thomas Mann’s novel Confessions of Felix Krull Confidence Man for an upcoming movie.

In his keynotes, Kehlmann gives illuminating accounts of events throughout European history, including World War II, The Thirty Years War, and more, and exploring themes such as a godless world and how art has shaped history. While he is an expert historian, his experience with screenplays and book-to-movie adaptations give his speeches a modern flair, and he explores how artificial intelligence will affect the humanities in the future.

He currently lives in Berlin and New York with his wife and son.