The best-selling author Nell Zink in Germany
Nell Zink lived quietly in a small German town – until a letter to Jonathan Franzen helped her make her breakthrough.
Actually she only wanted to convince Jonathan Franzen that ornithology and quality literature could be united in a book. And then, in the autumn of 2014, Nell Zink’s debut novel, The Wallcreeper, was hailed as a literary sensation in the United States. Critics spoke of a “masterpiece”, an “extraordinary talent” and an “astonishing originality”. Ever since, the then fifty-year-old debutant novelist Nell Zink has been mentioned in the same breath as John Irving and Joseph Heller.
Nell Zink, born in California in 1964, grew up in rural Virginia. She studied philosophy at the College of William and Mary. At the age of 29 she founded, along with her then husband, a band and published the zine Animal Review, which featured music criticism and animal stories. One of Zink’s stories found its way accidentally into the hands of an Israeli musicologist. They met; eight months later they married and moved to the vicinity of Tel Aviv. In Israel Zink became friends with the writer Avner Shats. She wrote stories for him, as later she did for her friends in Tübingen. In 2000 she moved to the city on the Neckar River, which she had already visited in her youth. There she took a PhD in Media Studies, worked at the newspaper the Schwäbisches Tagblatt and as a translator for an agency.
Next book in autumn 2016
When her Swabian clique migrated to Berlin, Zink joined them. But because she could not afford to live in Berlin, the occasional writer moved to nearby Bad Belzig. There, on the mattress of a one-room student flat, she wrote The Wall Creeper. An impetus for this came from none other than the American best-selling author Jonathan Franzen, a hobby ornithologist. Occasioned by an article by Franzen on the murder of birds in the Mediterranean, the passionate environmentalist and bird conservationist Zink wrote him a reply. They began a correspondence, in the course of which Franzen recommended that Zink publish her work. Out of habit Zink still emphasizes today that she really wrote her first novel, The Wall Creeper, a crazy, fantastic tale out of the German eco-activist scene, for Franzen, not for the general public.
But slowly Zink has learned to resign herself to the fact that she can no longer exclude the public from her literary work. Her second novel, Mislaid, was published in the United States in 2015 and was nominated for the National Book Award. Her third book, Nicotine, will appear in the autumn of 2016.
