Michael Lentz

Michael Lentz is a novelist, poet, musician, and performance artist. In 1989, he joined the composer Joseph Anton Riedl's ensemble Musik/Film/Dia/Licht-Galerie as a saxophonist, and played in the ensemble until Riedl's death. In 2000, Lentz published his PhD thesis, "Sound Poetry/Sound Music after 1945". A year later, he won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize-the highest honor recognizing new German writing-for Motherdying. He has since published three novels, and released new music as part of the trio Lentz, Geisse, Wertmüller. Lentz's music often experiments with speech and utterance, and his writing (particularly his poetry) foregrounds sound; across form and genre, his artistic endeavors bleed into each other. In his scholarship, in his music, and in his literature, Lentz is avant-garde-there are few contemporary artists who better exemplify the meaning of the word. In his work across all media, there is the restless striving to find that which defies or complicates classification. He has said that his writing might "break the teeth" of translators. Like all great avant-garde writers, however, Lentz is also aware that such striving always evokes the shadow of tradition. His novels contain the (sometimes literal) ghosts of German-language writers like Carlfriedrich Claus and Thomas Bernhardt, and the great avant-garde figures of history: Gertrude Stein, Laurence Sterne, Hieronymous Bosch. In Lentz's words, "There is nothing more embarrassing than the belief that one has invented something." Motherdying is Lentz's first book to be translated into English, along with his 1,001-page novel Schattenfroh (forthcoming, Deep Vellum, 2025). Lentz sees the two books as connected: in the latter, a character eats a copy of Motherdying. He lives in Berlin and Leipzig. He continues to play the saxophone for three hours per day.