Reader (Schlink)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 6, 1944
• Where—Bielefeld, Germany
• Awards—Hans Fallada Prize (Italy); Prix Laure Bataillon
  (France); Glauser Prize (Germany) 
• Currently—New York, New York

Bernhard Schlink is the author of the internationally best selling novel The Reader and of four crime novels, The Gordian Knot, Self Deception, Self-Administered Justice, and Self Slaughter, which are currently being translated into English. He is a professor at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, in New York. (From the publisher.)

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Bernhard Schlink is a German writer with a legal background. He became a judge at the Constitutional Court of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1988 and is a professor for public law and the philosophy of law at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany as of January 2006.

His career as a writer began with several detective novels with a main character named Selb—a play on the German word for "self"— (the first, Self's Punishment, co-written with Walter Popp is available in the UK). One of these, Die gordische Schleife, won the Glauser Prize in 1989.

In 1995 he published The Reader (Der Vorleser), a partly autobiographical novel about a teenager who has an affair with a woman in her thirties who suddenly vanishes but whom he meets again as a law student when visiting a trial about war crimes. The book became a bestseller both in Germany and the United States and was translated into 39 languages.

The Reader, translated by Carol Brown Janeway, was the first German book to reach the number one position in the New York Times bestseller list. In 1997 it won the Hans Fallada Prize, an Italian literary award, and the Prix Laure Bataillon for works translated into French. In 1999 it was awarded the "WELT - Literaturpreis" of the newspaper Die Welt. In 2000, Schlink published a collection of short fiction called Flights of Love.

In 2010, Schlink published The Weekend, about a pardoned German terrorist from the late 1960's, who meets with old friends and comrades in a weekend country house to recall old times. (From Wikipedia.)