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Gothenburg Book Fair 2025 proudly presents the first name within this year’s theme, Drama: the internationally acclaimed German playwright and author Roland Schimmelpfennig. With a poetic and innovative narrative style, he has redefined contemporary European drama. One of the most performed playwrights in Europe, Schimmelpfennig will join the Book Fair in September to speak about the power of drama to reflect our times – and to meet a new audience.
With Drama as this year’s theme, the Book Fair brings the performing arts to the exhibition floor and explores how playwrights use their craft to illuminate the pressing issues of our time. Through encounters between novelists, playwrights, and actors, the programme investigates the relationship between plays and novels while tackling life’s big themes: love, existence, and the future.
Roland Schimmelpfennig is one of the most recognised playwrights in Europe, with his plays translated into more than 40 languages. His works are known for their poetic style, fragmented narratives, and exploration of existential and political questions of today. He has written around thirty plays, including The Golden Dragon (2009), The Crack in the World (2019), and the magnificent antique project Anthropolis I-V (Deutsches Schauspielhaus 2023-25).
Schimmelpfennig has received several prestigious awards, including the Else Lasker-Schüler Playwright Award and the Nestroy Prize. In 2024 Roland Schimmelpfennig was announced “Playwright of the Year” by the German theatre critics. At the Book Fair, he will meet an audience that extends far beyond the traditional theatre audience – book lovers, authors, researchers, librarians, and teachers all gather here. Through the theme of Drama and Schimmelpfennig’s participation, more people may discover drama as a literary genre and its unique ability to portray the human experience.
– What a wonderful and bold project – to shine a light on drama in the grand halls of Gothenburg’s fair, and in doing so, place the theatre space between two book spines. Theatre means freedom and celebrates the playful spirit of humanity, even when it fails. But most importantly, theatre – and therefore drama – is a place for dialogue, and dialogue is the most precious achievement of our civilization. Drama and theatre are part of our cultural DNA, and at the same time, theatre is an elusive, fragile art form. It is reinvented every evening before the audience’s eyes, and then, when the curtain falls and the lights go out, it disappears again – and precisely because of this, because each new generation must encounter the art and language of theatre with their own breath, we need places where we can trust to find it – in books, in libraries, says Roland Schimmelpfennig.
In Schimmelpfennig’s plays, the characters – often unnamed – tell stories about themselves or others. The lines may sound like stage directions or commentary. He draws on the full arsenal of narrative techniques from fiction. Who is the narrator? What is being said, and why? Where does the beautiful, concrete, and emotionally resonant language lead us? It portrays both the inner life of individuals and the society around them. At the Book Fair, Roland Schimmelpfennig will participate in the seminar programme together with Ulf Peter Hallberg, taking part in conversations about contemporary drama, its place in literature, and its power to challenge and inspire.
A theme uniting the Nordic and Baltic regions
First announced at last year’s closing press conference, the Drama theme has now evolved into a Nordic-Baltic collaboration. All countries from the Nordic and Baltic regions are represented. The theme is organised by Colombine Theatre Agency (Sweden), Dramatikkens hus (Norway), Eesti Teatri Agentuur (Estonia), Theatre Info Finland (TINFO), and Gothenburg Book Fair, in cooperation with Latvian Theatre Workers Union and the Lithuanian Theatre Information Centre, with additional support from Danske Dramatikere (Denmark) and Performing Arts Iceland.
Read the entire press notice here.