Vienna-born actor and writer Robert Seethaler, whose novels The Tobacconist and A Whole Life have gained critical acclaim in the UK, will be the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre’s Writer-in-Residence in 2017. The way the lives and deaths of Seethaler’s unassuming heroes, intertwined with the history of Austria in the 1920s, 1930s and post-War times, present us with the rich canvas of ordinary lives devoid of sentimentality, where fictional encounters with famous Austrians like Sigmund Freud are not all that strange.

Seethaler and UK actor Joseph Kloska (The Crown, Made in Dagenham) will read in German and English followed by a panel discussion with the translator Charlotte Collins.