Florian Gantner is an Austrian writer based in Vienna. He has published the novels Trockenschwimmer (2015), O.M. (2018), Soviel man weiß (2021), and Eternal Partner (2024). His writing is sharp and deeply attentive to the tensions of contemporary life.
In addition to his novels, his work has appeared in literary journals such as Lichtungen and Die Rampe. He has received several literary awards and fellowships, including the Theodor Körner Prize and a residency at the Literary Colloquium Berlin.
Interview by Sheila Rexho
Interviewer: If we go back to the beginning: in terms of that first spark: perhaps an image, a sentence, a fear maybe that made you think “this must be published or this must become a book?
Florian Gantner: I never think, “This has to become a book” … But usually there is an image or a scene that haunts me, and I write it away, so to speak. In his “Heptalogy,” Jon Fosse describes a painter who paints pictures in order to free himself from them. At the beginning filmmaker David Lynch had the image of a severed ear and built his film “Blue Velvet” around it. For me, it’s usually similar: I have an image and see how it can develop. It’s not the thought, “This has to become a book,” but rather, “How can this work as a story or artwork?”
Interviewer: What was your first “serious” reading experience or the book that restructured your sense of what literature can do?
Florian Gantner: I started reading “serious” literature very early on. I had an older sister, in whose room lay the classics she had to read for school – which I then read. I was probably too young to understand much of it. I was overwhelmed by authors who left classic storytelling behind. I rubbed my eyes when reading “Tristram Shandy” or the first hundred pages of Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow”. My first books were also strongly influenced by narrative experiments.
Nowadays, I am less impressed by formal achievements than linguistic ones, most recently the works of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld or Anna Burns.
Interviewer: What is something you once believed about yourself that your writing has quietly corrected over the years?
Florian Gantner: I don’t think my writing has contributed to self-awareness. However, I’m not particularly interested in autobiographical writing, nor do I value the therapeutic aspect of writing. I’m interested in how people interact with each other. I try to understand how they think. You could even say that I’m writing myself further and further away.
Interviewer: Albania carries both a strong memory of surveillance and also a rapidly changing present. When you chose it as a landscape for your fiction, were you searching for a specific moral tension between intimacy and mistrust, past and future, visibility and secrecy?
Florian Gantner: Albania and its history play an important role in my novel “Soviel man weiß”. This one time, the origin of my interest was truly biographical: I spent several months as a scholarship holder at the Literary Colloquium Berlin, where I was neighbors with two people from literary Albania, Sokol Mici and Anna Kove. I was working on a novel about surveillance at the time. Through conversations with Sokol and Anna, I realized that the history of Albania (Sigurimi, etc.) was perfect for my book project. Some topics just seem to come flying at me … The themes you mention, such as mistrust, etc., were already present in the novel, but on a personal level. With the history of Albania, I was able to reflect on these themes on a historical and political level as well.
Interviewer: Who are the writers you trust for truth when the world gets a little bit noisy and what kind of truth do they offer (psychological, political, spiritual, comic etc)?
Florian Gantner: Frankly speaking, when it comes to current issues, I don’t rely on writers. Philosophers or journalists are more suitable sources for that. Writers are good with language. Ideally, they show readers the human condition, show what makes us human. And that’s pretty good, isn’t it?
Interviewer: When your work crosses languages, what must translation protect above everything: meaning, rhythm, cultural nuance, or emotional temperature?
Florian Gantner: The most important thing is that the idea is translated into the target language. To be honest, there are only a few languages in which I could judge the result. I trust the respective translator to have a feel for the nuances.
Interviewer:Which part of your work feels most “true” to you?
Florian Gantner: Ultimately, it is the readers who decide what is true—when I receive feedback and the reader has understood what I wanted to say with my novel, then I am satisfied. It gets interesting when readers find things in the book that I myself didn’t see. That’s the best moment, when it feels like the book is coming to life. Like a grown-up child that you send out into the world – but without any melancholy, let’s say the child keeps in touch regularly afterwards.
Interviewer: Do you believe a novel should comfort the reader, disturb them, or educate their attention, and which of these is the hardest to achieve?
Florian Gantner: It’s difficult to find a general formula. On the one hand, a little bit of everything wouldn’t be bad, of course: creating a rollercoaster of emotions, readers who are doubled over in pain on one page and laughing out loud on the next – that would be appealing! But I think it’s more likely to go wrong if I say to myself as an author: I’m now going to write a book to educate readers, for example. You shouldn’t mind the audience when you’re writing. I write because I want a text to work. Only afterwards can I think about its effect.
Interviewer: What do you consider more dangerous in literature: sentimentality that pretends to be depth, or intelligence that pretends to be feeling?
Florian Gantner: I think the former. What really bothers me is for what author Karl-Heinz Ott formed the funny term “Bedeutsamkeitserschleichung” (a term that is hard to translate, let’s say:” deception of significance”), meaning authors who bring up the weightiest topics in order to give the impression that they are creating something extremely profound, when in fact they are producing mediocre literature at best. Just because terrible things happen in a book doesn’t automatically mean it’s good. Unfortunately, the literary market is such that these lurid topics get the most attention. Almost all reviewers, book bloggers, etc. only comment on the (crass) content of a book; almost no one discusses its language or form. The book that has moved me the most in recent weeks was about a child watching his parents slowly grow apart. This is something that happens all the time. But it was simply well written and therefore deeply moving.
Interviewer: Which line should a writer never cross and who decides where that line is?
Florian Gantner: I don’t believe in prohibitions. Recently, I stumbled across a comment online: someone wrote that Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” can no longer be read today. Which is complete nonsense. In “Lolita,” Nabokov shows us how evil thinks and how corrupting language can be. By reading Nabokov, you learn how to read. The commenter was someone who reads a book “naively”: they only see the content, they see the story of abuse.
You have to trust readers to be mature. Sometimes it’s worth taking a step over the line, to understand.
