Background
Christoph Ransmayr was born on March 20, 1954, in Wels, Upper Austria, Austria. He grew up in Roitham near Gmunden and the Traunsee.
Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien, Austria
Christoph studied philosophy and ethnology in Vienna from 1972 to 1978.
Austria
Christoph Ransmayr at the interview
Austria
Christoph Ransmayr
Austria
Christoph Ransmayr reciting his piece of work
Austria
Christoph Ransmayr
Austria
Christoph Ransmayr
Austria
Christoph Ransmayr
Austria
Christoph Ransmayr
Christoph Ransmayr was born on March 20, 1954, in Wels, Upper Austria, Austria. He grew up in Roitham near Gmunden and the Traunsee.
Christoph studied philosophy and ethnology in Vienna from 1972 to 1978.
Christoph Ransmayr began his career as cultural editor for the newspaper Extrablatt, where he worked from 1978 to 1982. He also published articles and essays in GEO, TransAtlantik, and Merian.
Ransmayr’s first book, "Strahlender Untergang," was published in 1982. This first book sets out what will be an enduring preoccupation for Ransmayr, and his choice of the desert as an extreme, ultimately indifferent, the environment is fundamental: by setting his subject outside any social order, Ransmayr can investigate how narrative can produce, but equally erase, human presence. If literature existed as a hermetic, fantasy realm, then this experiment might be of limited interest, but Ransmayr is keen to examine how literature is related to history, how fiction relates to fact: if a fictional author writes about a historical event, he cannot change the course of that event, but perhaps he can change how, historically and culturally, that event is remembered. This is something Ransmayr takes up in his second book, "Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis," which was published in 1984.
Ransmayr’s next novel appeared four years later to great critical acclaim. Indeed, "Die letzte Welt" is the text for which Ransmayr became famous. It has been translated into many languages and received much scholarly attention. Critics are particularly fascinated by the way Ransmayr returns to an ancient text, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and reworks it to include the media technologies of the twentieth century. After this novel was published in 1988, he did extensive traveling in Ireland, Asia, North and South America. For many years, Ransmayr lived in relative isolation in West Cork, but returned to Austria in 2006.
Ransmayr is a painstaking writer and he has become notorious for the long breaks between his novels. Indeed, it was to be seven years before "Morbus Kitahara" was published in 1995. In an interview, Ransmayr has talked about the amount of time it took him to craft the novel’s all-important first sentence; the weight of the whole book hangs from these lines and they must be able to bear its load. Although Ransmayr was working on other projects, eleven years then passed before the appearance of his most recent novel, "Der fliegende Berg," published in 2006. Written in unrhymed verse, the form of this work resembles that of his first. Ransmayr calls this ‘Flattersatz’, meaning unjustified text, but, literally meaning ‘fluttering type’, it refers here to the way the layout of the text reflects the flying mountain of the title. The novel is set in Ireland and the Himalayas, and the isolation of these environments is a reinscription of the extreme topographies which have preoccupied Ransmayr throughout his career.
Ransmayr has a keen interest in visual art and has collaborated with photographers and artists. The first editions of Strahlender Untergang and Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis included photographs by Willy Puchner and Rudi Palla respectively, and he has written an essay to accompany a project by the German artist Anselm Kiefer, "Der Ungeborene oder die Himmelsareale des Anselm Kiefer." When Kiefer was awarded the Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels in 2008, Ransmayr used an interview with Der Spiegel to support the decision, because some opposing voices had criticized the award, since Kiefer’s work often depicts destruction or the aftermath of destruction. He has also produced a collection of vignettes to accompany the marine painting of Austrian artist Manfred Wakolbinger, "Damen & Herren unter Wasser."
In addition to his prose, Ransmayr has written two plays. His first, "Die Unsichtbare. Tirade an drei Stränden," was premiered at the Salzburger Festspiele, and his second, "Odysseus, Verbrecher. Schauspiel einer Heimkehr," was commissioned for the 2010 Ruhr Festival. Here, Ransmayr once again uses the formula which had been so successful in his prose, setting an ancient myth in modern, or perhaps postmodern, times. However, it received a rather lukewarm critical response at its premiere.
Since 1997, Ransmayr has produced a number of small volumes which form part of an experimental series, "Spielformen des Erzählens." These often playful works have gone relatively unnoticed, but demonstrate Ransmayr’s sustained interest in the idea of narrative as act or performance. They include: "Die Unsichtbare"; "Die Verbeugung des Riesen. Vom Erzählen"; "Geständnisse eines Touristen. Ein Verhör"; "Damen & Herren unter Wasser." And in 2011, he published a kind of double act with his fellow Austrian author, Martin Pollack, "Der Wolfsjäger. Drei polnische Duette."
In 2012 Ransmayr’s next larger project "Atlas eines ängstlichen Mannes" was released, which combines his life-long interest in travel and narrative form in a compendium of personal experiences gathered on different journeys.
Ransmayr is a member of Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung.