Klaus Modick

Many of Modick's novels are concerned with German–American themes, for Example, Die Schatten der Ideen, which tells the story of a German historian who emigrates to the US in 1935 and later finds himself swept up in the witch-hunts of the McCarthy Era.

Other exile-themed novels include Sunset, which tells of the friendship between Bertolt Brecht and Lion Feuchtwanger whilst in Los Angeles in the early 1940s.

Klaus Modick (born 3 May 1951) is a German author and literary translator.

Klaus Modick was born in Oldenburg and completed his secondary education at the Altes Gymnasium there in 1971.

He then attended Hamburg University, where he read German, History and Educational Theory, completing his teaching qualification in 1977.

Modick then took a doctorate in 1980, with a thesis on the German-Jewish novelist and playwright Lion Feuchtwanger.

Modick spent five years as an advertising copywriter and worked as a part-time lecturer in German literature in the higher education sector before becoming a freelance writer and translator in 1984.

In 1984 he married an American citizen he met during one of his frequent visits to Crete and they have two daughters.

From 1986 to 1992 Modick wrote a monthly column on paperbacks for Die Zeit and from 1997 to 2002 for Die Tageszeitung.

He has held a number of guest lectureships in Germany, the US and Japan (see below).

He is a member of PEN Centre Germany and has received numerous awards.

Modick returned to live in Oldenburg in 2000 after spending several years abroad, including a year in Rome and another in Paris and 'three to four years' in the USA.

From 2000 to 2003 he was a member of the literary commission of the Lower Saxony Ministry for Science and the Arts, having previously received a number of awards from this body.

Modick is also an essayist and literary critic and has published several volumes of non-fiction writings including Das Stellen der Schrift, Milder Rausch and Ein Bild und tausend Worte.

Modick has said that he feels a special affinity with Crete and its people and in 2003 he published the novel Der kretische Gast, set in 1943 during the German occupation of Crete.

Sunset was nominated in 2011 for the German Book Prize and the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize.

As a literary translator Modick has translated numerous English-language works into German including works by Aravind Adiga, Sebastian Faulks, William Gaddis, William Goldman, Sudhir Kakar, Victor LaValle, Andrew Motion, Jeffrey Moore, John O'Hara, Robert Olmstead, Matt Beynon Rees, Charles Simmons, Robert Louis Stevenson and Nathanael West.

Modick's 2015 novel Konzert ohne Dichter, which tells of the difficult relationship between artist Heinrich Vogeler and poet Rainer Maria Rilke in 1905, became an almost immediate bestseller on publication.

Modick has enjoyed great critical acclaim in the German-speaking world.

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Despite his high reputation in the German-speaking world and prolific output, Modick was not translated into English until 2020, when his novella Moos, translated by David Herman, was published under the title Moss by Bellevue Literary Press, New York, NY.

A number of his works have English titles, reflecting the time Modick spent in the US.