Light out of Darkness

PATRICK ROTH is a German-American writer. He moved to the US in his early twenties and has lived here for many years. He began his artistic career as a director and screenwriter in Los Angeles; in the early 1990s, he switched to prose and developed his cinema-influenced style as a storyteller. He is renowned as a writer of biblical-archetypal narratives, dramatized in a cinematically expressionistic prose that makes the mythical themes come alive again. A prime example of this approach, unique in contemporary German literature, is “Die Christus Trilogie” (The Christ Trilogy), which caused a sensation among audiences and critics at its first publishing in the 1990s. His novel “Sunrise – Das Buch Joseph” (Sunrise – the Book of Joseph, 2012), which tells the fictional story of Mary’s husband, was nominated for the “German Book Prize” and his latest work, the short novel “Gottesquartett” (God’s Quartet), appeared in 2020. His most noted awarded poetry lectureships include the Universities of Frankfurt (2002), Heidelberg (2004/2012), and Vienna (2021). He has received literary awards from The Bible and Culture Foundation Prize, Hugo Ball Prize, and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation Prize for Literature.