Lutz Seiler grew up in the Langenberg district of Gera, Thuringia (former
East Germany). After training as a skilled building construction worker, he worked as a bricklayer and carpenter. During his national service in the
National People's Army (NVA) of the
DDR, he started to take an interest in literature and wrote his first poems. The poet
Peter Huchel was amongst those he first admired. Later he said "Why I started to read and write, I still have no idea. Literature was of no interest to me." During the DDR years Seiler's home town of Gera grew rapidly to service the
uranium mines at
Ronneburg and in his early poetry the symbolism of radioactivity was significant. In the summer of 1989 Seiler worked as a seasonal employee on the island of
Hiddensee, a popular former East German holiday resort located west of the island of
Rügen off the north-eastern coast of Germany, an experience that later formed the basis of his first novel published in 2014,
Kruso. Seiler read German Studies at the universities of
Halle (Saale) and
Berlin up to 1990. From 1993 to 1998 he was co-editor of the short-lived literary journal
Moosbrand published in Wilhelmshorst, near
Potsdam. Since 1997 he has been the literary director and custodian at the
Peter Huchel Museum in Wilhelmshorst, where he lives part time and writes in solitude. He also has a home in Stockholm with his wife. In 2005 he became a member of
PEN Centre Germany. In 2007 Seiler became a member of the Academy of the Arts and Sciences, Mainz and in 2010 a member of the
Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts and also the
Academy of Arts, Berlin. In 2007, Seiler was awarded the prestigious
Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for his short story volume
Turksib. Another volume of short stories,
Die Zeitwaage was nominated for the
Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2010. In 2011 the
German Academy for Language and Poetry elected Seiler a member. In 2015, Seiler held the chair in poetry at
Heidelberg, presenting three papers based on themes from his early enjoyment of woodworking. In 2023, British publisher
And Other Stories translated three of Seiler's works into English. That same year, he won the
Georg Büchner Prize. ==
Kruso ==