‘Romeo or Juliet’
Berlin Verlag, September 2017
Shortlisted for the German Book Prize 2017
Something strange happens to Kurt Prinzhorn at a writers’ meeting in Innsbruck: someone seems to have taken a very long bubble bath in the tub in his hotel room, purposely leaving behind traces. Yet nothing points to an intrusion by a stranger. Soon afterwards, the author runs into an old lover in Madrid, and the chain of odd incidents remains unbroken – until the pieces of the puzzle fall into place to form a picture that takes him far back into his past. But then, beneath the window of Prinzhorn’s room in Madrid, a woman’s dead body is found.
Gerhard Falkner was born in 1951 and is one of the most important German contemporary poets. He has published several volumes of poems, including Hölderlin Reparatur (‘Hölderlin Repair’), for which he received the Peter-Huchel-Prize in 2009. He has received numerous other awards and prizes. His novel Apollokalypse was nominated for the German Book Prize in 2016.