Christine Wunnicke

Christine Wunnicke (born 29 September 1966) is a German writer and translator. She has published novels, a novella and a biography, has written numerous radio plays and radio features, and translates English and Italian literature into German. Her novels are usually short and take documented historical figures and the scholarship of the 17th to 19th centuries as their starting point, which she reworks freely into fiction.

Die Dame mit der bemalten Hand (2020; "The Lady with the Painted Hand") reached the shortlist of the German Book Prize and won the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize, and Wachs (2025; "Wax") was shortlisted for the same prize. Her novel Der Fuchs und Dr. Shimamura (2015; "The Fox and Dr. Shimamura") appeared in English in 2019 in a translation by Philip Boehm.

In July 2026 she was named the winner of the Georg Büchner Prize; the award is to be presented in Darmstadt on 24 October 2026. Wunnicke keeps her distance from the literary establishment and appears in public only rarely.

Life and career Christine Wunnicke was born on 29 September 1966 in Munich. She studied linguistics, Old Germanic philology and psychology at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Glasgow, and afterwards worked in the science administration of the Max Planck Society in Munich. Since 1991 she has worked as a freelance author, at first mainly for radio: her first publications were radio features and radio plays for German broadcasters, and she turned to prose later. Her first novel, Fortescues Fabrik, appeared in 1998; Jetlag followed in 2000. She lives in Munich and Berlin.

Writing and themes Alongside her novels, Wunnicke has written a novella and a biography of the castrato . Her subjects are mostly historical figures and fields of knowledge of the 17th to the 19th century, which she has said find her rather than the other way round: "They find me; I don't have to look for them. They fly to me." These figures, as the reviewer Ulrich Rüdenauer put it, are "often not only eccentric and blessed with a very particular obsession, but also historically attested", yet in her books they develop a life of their own. She does not claim fidelity to the historical record; according to Deutschlandfunk Kultur, invention, fabulation and grotesque exaggeration are part of her method. In a 2017 profile she described her protagonists as "disintegrating persons, fragmented figures", and said that she keeps returning to "intermediate states, boundary crossings, dubious identities, doppelgängers". Wunnicke has called her short novels "novel haiku" (). According to Deutschlandfunk Kultur, emancipation, the Enlightenment and queer love run through her work, but are woven into the plots and their tone rather than foregrounded as themes.

Between 2015 and 2020, three of her novels appeared on the longlist of the German Book Prize. The third of them, Die Dame mit der bemalten Hand (2020), made the shortlist and won the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize. The novel stages a fictional meeting between the German explorer Carsten Niebuhr, who has been sent out to study the sites of biblical history, and the Persian astrolabe maker Musa al-Lahuri; shipwrecked together on an island near Bombay, the two try to reach an understanding without a common language, and the makeshift idiom they assemble out of Sanskrit, Arabic and German carries much of the book's comedy.

Wachs (2025), likewise shortlisted for the German Book Prize, is set in 18th-century France and centres on two historical women: the wax modeller Marie Biheron, daughter of a Parisian apothecary, and the botanical illustrator Madeleine Basseporte, who becomes first her teacher and later her partner. Because anatomical study was thought improper for women in France, Biheron acquired her skills elsewhere, in London; she supported her family by selling lifelike wax models of body parts and organs, and later lived from teaching and from the sale of her models. Reviewers noted the novel's treatment of gender and of the mechanisms by which knowledge is transmitted and controlled.

The jury of the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize described a body of work in which the genres mingle, naming the learned grotesque, the historical miniature novel and scientific satire, and wrote that Wunnicke commands the scientific jargons of different periods as well as mythological and religious idioms and their parodies. The jury of the Georg Büchner Prize praised the "power to astonish" of her work, her "unconcerned wilfulness" and her subtle verbal wit, and singled out the way her writing makes "the fictional visible in what is taken to be historical", allowing a revealing view of European scientific and colonial history without losing empathy for her characters. The settings of her books range from Hollywood and Nagasaki to Paris.

Her novels have been translated into several languages. The English translation of Der Fuchs und Dr. Shimamura by Philip Boehm, published by New Directions in 2019, won its translator the 2020 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize, awarded for translations from German into English.

Works Novels and other fiction Fortescues Fabrik. Albrecht Knaus Verlag, Munich 1998. . Jetlag. Knaus, Munich 2000. . Die Kunst der Bestimmung. Kindler Verlag, Berlin 2003. . Missouri. Männerschwarm Verlag, Hamburg 2006. . New edition: Albino, Berlin 2020. . Serenity. Osburg Verlag, Berlin 2008. . Nagasaki, ca. 1642. Novella. Edition Epoca, Zürich 2010. . Selig & Boggs. Die Erfindung von Hollywood. Berenberg Verlag, Berlin 2013. . Der Fuchs und Dr. Shimamura. Berenberg, Berlin 2015. . Katie. Berenberg, Berlin 2017. . Die Dame mit der bemalten Hand. Berenberg, Berlin 2020. . Wachs. Berenberg, Berlin 2025. .

English translations Missouri. Translated by David Miller. Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver 2010. The Fox and Dr. Shimamura. Translated by Philip Boehm. New Directions, New York 2019. .

Biography Die Nachtigall des Zaren. Das Leben des Kastraten Filippo Balatri. Claassen Verlag, Munich 2001. .

Translations John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester: Der beschädigte Wüstling. Männerschwarm Verlag, Hamburg 2005; dtv, Munich 2008. Ronald Firbank: Die Blume unter dem Fuße. Männerschwarm Verlag, Hamburg 2008. E. M. Forster: "Arthur Snatchfold", Der Antikenflügel, Spielt das denn eine Rolle? and Die Geschichte einer Panik. Short stories. In: E. M. Forster, Das künftige Leben. Männerschwarm Verlag, Hamburg 2009. Margherita Costa: Die schöne Frau bedarf der Zügel nicht. Portrait, selection of works and translation by Christine Wunnicke. Bilingual German/Italian edition. Berenberg, Berlin 2023. .

Radio plays (selection) Broadcasters are abbreviated as follows: BR, NDR, RB, SDR, SR, SWR and WDR. 1993: Die Träume des André Le Nôtre (dir. , SDR) 1994: Bozzy's Johnson (dir. , SDR) 1996: Das Walroß und der Zimmermann, eine Vampirgeschichte (dir. , SDR) 1997: Nothschrei eines Magnetisch-Vergifteten (after Friedrich Krauß) (dir. and music: , RB) 2000: We are a happy family. Punk in Amerika (dir. , RB/SR) 2002: Start me up (dir. , RB) 2006: Fleshcrafter (dir. , NDR) 2008: GPS Dream Lover (dir. , RB) 2018: Alles Rumi (dir. , RB) 2020: Alles Tatami (dir. , RB)

Radio features (selection) 1993: Gott Lullo selbst, unsterblich und erhaben. Die "Lulliade" des Ranieri de' Calzabigi (WDR) 1996: Radio Steam Calliope. Ezra Pounds Wege um die Musik (BR) 2002: Leben, Tod und Mysterien des fabelhaften Joe Meek (BR) 2006: Mountain High, River Deep – Glanz und Elend des Impresarios Phil Spector (BR) 2007: Ich ziehe die Freiheit den Brillantenketten vor. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (SWR) 2008: Die unbeugsame Astrea. Über die englische Schriftstellerin Aphra Behn (SWR) 2009: Die Welt, als Ohrring getragen. Leben und Anschauungen der Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (SWR) 2010: Die Brauerin von Streatham Park. Vom Leben, Lieben und Schreiben der Hester Thrale Piozzi (SWR) 2012: Die Geschichte des Derwischs Mirza Abdullah und seiner frommen Frau. Lady Isabel und Sir Richard Burton (SWR) 2015: The Ghost Club (dir. , SWR) 2019: Anatom der Welt. Vor 350 Jahren entdeckte der Däne Nicolaus Steno die Evolutionsgeschichte (BR)

Awards and honours 1998: , the international radio play prize of Croatian Radio, for Nothschrei eines Magnetisch-Vergifteten 1999: of the ARD 1999: Literature scholarship of the city of Munich 2002: Bayerischer Kunstförderpreis in the literature category, for Die Nachtigall des Zaren 2008: Toucan Prize of the city of Munich, for Serenity 2015: Longlist of the German Book Prize, for Der Fuchs und Dr. Shimamura 2016: , for Der Fuchs und Dr. Shimamura 2017: Longlist of the German Book Prize, for Katie 2019: – declined. Wunnicke had been chosen as one of two recipients, alongside the caricaturist , whose 2018 cartoon of the Israeli Eurovision winner Netta had been criticised as antisemitic. She stated that she did not consider Hanitzsch an antisemite, but that she did not want to be co-opted into what she called a "criticism-resistant solidarity event" on his behalf, and declined the award. 2020: Literaturpreis der Landeshauptstadt München (Munich Literary Prize) for her literary oeuvre 2020: Shortlist of the German Book Prize, for Die Dame mit der bemalten Hand 2020: Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize, for Die Dame mit der bemalten Hand 2024: International Merano Europa Literature Prize (translation category), for her German edition of Margherita Costa's Die schöne Frau bedarf der Zügel nicht 2025: Jean Paul Prize, awarded by the Free State of Bavaria for a literary life's work 2025: Shortlist of the German Book Prize, for Wachs 2026: Literaturpreis der Darmstädter Jury "Buch des Monats", for Wachs 2026: Georg Büchner Prize (to be presented on 24 October 2026)

Reception When Katie appeared in 2017, SWR Kultur made it its Book of the Week; in his review Ulrich Rüdenauer called it "a grotesquely comic novel, a book full of magic, a literary masterpiece". The novel explores the borderland between science and spiritualism in 1870s London and centres on the physicist William Crookes and the medium Florence Cook.

After the Büchner Prize was announced in 2026, Rüdenauer wrote in the taz that Wunnicke moves between microscopic scrutiny of historical situations and witty comedy. Deutschlandfunk Kultur's Wiebke Porombka credited her with turning curiosity about how knowledge comes into being into entertaining plots, and described her novels as moving between insight and the pleasure of going astray. The jury of the Jean Paul Prize, which she received in 2025, called her an exceptional figure in contemporary German-language literature whose art of the historical snapshot rests on an "equally elegant and clear economy of text".

References

Christine Wunnicke

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