Hanns-Josef Ortheil

Hanns-Josef Ortheil (b. 5 November 1951 in Cologne) is a German author, scholar of German literature, and pianist. He has written many autobiographical and historical novels, some of which have been translated into 11 languages, according to WorldCat: French, Dutch, Modern Greek, Spanish, Chinese, Lithuanian, Japanese, Slovenian, and Russian.

He was born the fifth son in an educated family; his mother, Mary Catherine Ortheil, was a librarian and his father a railroad surveyor and director. As a child, he did not speak, because his mother had temporarily lost her speech, following the loss of four sons during the Second World War. When Ortheil learned to play the piano, this was for him the first time he could express himself and communicate with the world around him. He at first wanted to be a pianist, and studied for a period at the Rome Conservatory.

In Germany he attended the Mainz Rabanus-Maurus-Gymnasium, and then the Universities of Mainz, Göttingen, Paris and Rome. His subjects were musicology, philosophy, Germanic, and comparative literature. During this time, he worked as a film and music journalist for the Mainz Allgemeine Zeitung and then a feature writer and literary critic, for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, TIME, The World, Der Spiegel and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. In 1976 he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the theory of the novel in the era of the French Revolution at the German Institute of the University of Mainz.

Among his published works is a travel narrative (Die Moselreise) he had already written as a boy of eleven, when his father took him on a tour of the Moselle.

Non-fiction

• Der poetische Widerstand im Roman, Königstein/Taunus 1980
• Mozart im Innern seiner Sprachen, Frankfurt/Main 1982
• Das Glück der Musik – Vom Vergnügen Mozart zu hören, München 2006
• Wie Romane entstehen, München 2008, gemeinsam mit Klaus Siblewski
• Lesehunger. Ein Bücher-Menu in 12 Gängen., München 2009
• Wilhelm Klemm – Ein Lyriker der "Menschheitsdämmerung". Stuttgart 1979
• Jean Paul, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1984

Fiction and historical fiction

• 1979 Aspekte-Literaturpreis
• 1981 Förderpreis des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen für Literatur
• 1982 Sonderpreis der Lektoren beim Ingeborg-Bachmann-Wettbewerb[
• 1988 Literaturpreis der Stadt Stuttgart
• 1991 Villa-Massimo-Stipendium
• 2000 Brandenburgischer Literaturpreis
• 2000/2001 Mainzer Stadtschreiber
• 2001 Verdienstmedaille des Landes Baden-Württemberg
• 2002 Thomas-Mann-Preis
• 2004 Georg-K.-Glaser-Preis
• 2006 Koblenzer Literaturpreis
• 2007 Nicolas-Born-Preis
• 2009 Elisabeth-Langgässer-Literaturpreis