Profile of Bernhard Schlink on Famous Like Me

Bernhard Schlink (born 6 July 1944 in Großdornberg) is a German writer with a legal background. He became a judge at the Constitutional Court of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1988 and is a professor of the history of law at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany as of May 2004.

His career as a writer began with several detective novels with a main character named Selbs—a play on the German word for "self"— (the first, Self's Punishment being available in the UK). One of these, Die gordische Schleife, won the Glauser Prize in 1989. In 1995 he published The Reader (Der Vorleser), a partly autobiographical novel about a teenager who has an affair with a woman in her thirties who suddenly vanishes but whom he meets again as a law student when visiting a trial about war crimes. The book became a bestseller both in Germany and the United States and was translated into 35 languages. It was the first German book to reach the number one position in the New York Times bestseller list. In 1997 it won the Hans Fallada Prize, an Italian literary award, and the Prix Laure Bataillon for works translated into French. In 1999 it was awarded the "WELT - Literaturpreis" of the newspaper Die Welt. In 2000, Schlink published a collection of short fiction called Flights of Love.

Bibliography (Titles in German)

• 1987 Selbs Justiz (Self's Punishment; with Walter Popp)
• 1988 Die gordische Schleife
• 1992 Selbs Betrug
• 1995 Der Vorleser (The Reader)
• 2000 Liebesfluchten (Flights of Love)
• 2001 Selbs Mord

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