Norman Ohler
Germany
Norman Ohler is a famous German author, novelist and screenwriter. His articles were published in the magazines Spiegel, Stern, Geo, and DIE ZEIT. His first novel Die Quotenmaschine (1995) is regarded as the first hyper-text novel worldwide. This book, together with Mitte and Ponte City form Ohler’s City Trilogy. Norman Ohler is a member of the PEN-Club.
In 1993, Ohler moved to New York, where he co-founded Tribes Gallery in Lower Manhattan in 1994. In 2004, while holding the post of City Writer in Ramallah, Palestine, he was the last European to interview Yassir Arafat before his death.
In film, Ohler collaborated with Wim Wenders writing the script for Palermo Shooting, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival 2008. Two years later he wrote, directed, and produced his own first short film, Natural, starring Henry Hopper and Eva Bay.
After five years of research, his first nonfiction book, Der totale Rausch (tr. Blitzed), about the role of drugs in Nazi-Germany, appeared in 2015, and immediately became a world-wide phenomenon, translated into over 29 languages. And in 2017, his new novel The Equation of Life appeared. It is about Frederik the Great’s obsession with draining swampland, turning it into farmland, especially in the East of Prussia.