Gerhard Roth is an Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

n writer.

Life

The son of a medical practitioner, Roth originally also wanted to study medicine himself, but soon focussed on literature. Initially, he earned his living as a computer programmer; he has been a freelance writer since 1976. From 1973 to 1978, he was member of the Grazer Autorenversammlung

Grazer Autorenversammlung

The Grazer Autorinnen Autorenversammlung was founded under the name of Grazer Autorenversammlung in March 1973 and is one of the two major Austrian writers' association . H. C. Artmann was its first president...

 before he moved to Hamburg

Hamburg

-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...

 in 1979. Since 1986, he has alternately lived in Vienna

Vienna

Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

 and in Styria.

He has won many literature prizes, among which are the literature prize of Styria (1976), the Alfred-Döblin-Prize (1983), and the Bruno-Kreisky

Bruno Kreisky

Bruno Kreisky was an Austrian politician who served as Foreign Minister from 1959 to 1966 and as Chancellor from 1970 to 1983. Aged 72 at the end of his chancellorship, he was the oldest acting Chancellor after World War II....

-Prize (2002). In 1995, he was awarded the Golden Romy for his screenplay of Schnellschuss.

Work

Roth refers to himself as "someone obsessed with writing in the best sense." In the focus is the hero, struggling in vain, to whom the world appears to be a torturous, intolerable state. Often Roth externally couches his writings in the form of a crime novel

Crime fiction

Crime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalizes crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred...

, in which he emphasises the unravelling of the hidden, in a figurative sense.

The focus of his main opus, Die Archive des Schweigens, is the re-appraisal of Austrian history in today's political and social systems.

Writings

• Die Archive des Schweigens. Cycle of novels with the following parts:
  • Der Stille Ozean, 1980
  • Landläufiger Tod, 1984
  • Am Abgrund, 1986
  • Der Untersuchungsrichter, 1988
  • Im tiefen Österreich, 1990
  • Die Geschichte der Dunkelheit, 1991
  • Eine Reise in das Innere von Wien, 1991
• Novels:
  • die autobiographie des albert einstein, 1972
  • Der Wille zur Krankheit, 1973
  • Der große Horizont, 1974
  • Ein neuer Morgen, 1976
  • Winterreise, 1978
  • Die schönen Bilder beim Trabrennen, 1982
  • Der See, 1995
  • Der Plan, 1998
  • Der Berg, 2000
  • Der Strom, 2002
  • Das Labyrinth, 2004
  • Das Alphabet der Zeit, 2007
• Narrations
  • Der Ausbruch des Weltkriegs, 1972
  • Circus Saluti, 1981
  • Das Töten des Bussards, 1982
• Dramas
  • Lichtenberg, 1973
  • Sehnsucht, 1977
  • Dämmerung, 1978
  • Erinnerungen an die Menschheit, 1985
  • Franz Lindner und er selber, 1987
  • Fremd in Wien, 1993
• Autobiography
  • Das Alphabet der Zeit, August 2007
• Essays
  • Über Bienen. (German/Japanese; with photos by Franz Killmeyer). Folio, Wien und Bozen 1996.
  • Das doppelköpfige Österreich, 1995
  • Gsellmanns Weltmaschine (with Franz Killmeyer)
• several radio drama
  Radio drama
  Radio drama is a dramatized, purely acoustic performance, broadcast on radio or published on audio media, such as tape or CD. With no visual component, radio drama depends on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine the characters and story...
  
  s and screenplay
  Screenplay
  A screenplay or script is a written work that is made especially for a film or television program. Screenplays can be original works or adaptations from existing pieces of writing. In them, the movement, actions, expression, and dialogues of the characters are also narrated...
  
  s (in some cases of his own novels)

External links

• Review of the book, "Das Alphabet der Zeit" (in German)
• "Gerhard Roth's Orkus Novels The Lake, The Plan, The Mountain, and The Stream as Murder Mysteries" by Pamela S. Saur, Clues: A Journal of Detection 29.1 (2011)