Sibylle Berg


Sibylle Berg is a Swiss author and playwright. She writes novels, essays, short fiction, plays, radio plays, and columns.
Berg is a contemporary author who is considered one of the most famous and influential writers and playwrights in the German-speaking world. Her books have been translated into 30 languages. Sibylle Berg has won numerous prestigious awards over her many years of career. Berg's writing was compared to that of Kurt Vonnegut, Brett Easton Ellis, Michel Houellebecq and Will Self. She has become an iconic figure in German alternative subcultures, gaining a very large fan base among the LGBT community and the European artistic communities. She lives in Switzerland and Israel.

Life

Berg was born on June 2, 1968 in Weimar. She spent her childhood and youth with a foster family in Constanta. Her father was a music professor and her mother was a librarian. Before beginning her higher education in West Germany, she was trained as a combat diver. She studied oceanography at the University of Hamburg and worked in various works. In 1996, she moved to Zurich, Switzerland. She married in 2004 and holds Swiss citizenship since 2012. Sibylle Berg is known to support the Straight Edge movement.]Berg describes herself as Non Binary.

Novelist

Sibylle Berg's first novel, "A Few People Search For Happiness And Laugh Themselves To Death" was published in 1997 by Reclam Publishing after being rejected by 50 other publishers. The book sold around 400,000 copies, and continues to sell today, 23 years later.
Berg has written 15 novels. On the occasion of a new book being published, Sibylle Berg tends to direct and put out a tour that usually is more of a rock concert than a book reading. Normally this events attracts thousands of people in each show. In 2012, with the release of her book Vielen Dank für das Leben, the book tour included contributions from film and theater actors Katia Riemann, Mathias Brandt and musician Marie Ocher.
In the tour upon the release of the novel GRM brainfuck Sibylle Berg created a multimedia reading show with three actors, the young grime star rapper T.Roadz and veteran Grime stars, founder of Ruff Sqwad Rappers Prince Rapid and Slix. In 2019, GRM - Brainfuck was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch and spent months on the bestseller list and sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

Playwright

Sibylle Berg has written 27 plays. In 2000 in Bochum, her second play Helges Leben was staged and commissioned for the Mulheim Theater Festival.
In 2008 the play Von denen die überleben was staged in the central theater of Zurich in collaboration with well-known artists such as Jon Pylypchuk, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, and more.
In 2013, Sibylle Berg began working with Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, and her first play, Es sagt mir nichts, das sogenannete Draussen, was selected in 2014 as the play of the year by Theater heute.
In 2015, the play Und dann kam Mirna won the Friedrich Luft Prize as the best production in Berlin and Potsdam.
In 2019, the play Wonderland Ave was invited to the Mülheim Theatertagen.
In 2019, the play Hate Triptych - Ways out of the crisis won the Nestroypreis as the best play of the year in German-speaking countries.
Berg's plays have been staged and aired in the United States, Britain, Italy, France, Spain, Poland, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary, Turkey, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Romania and Bulgaria.

Social activism

Berg has written various contributions for Die Zeit, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Die Presse, among others. She has also been a columnist for Spiegel Online since January 2011, under the title S.P.O.N. – Fragen Sie Frau Sibylle, published weekly until March 2018, and bi-weekly since then. The column has more than 4 million followers. Berg also conducts a regular interview series for the Swiss online magazine Republik entitled "Nerds Save The World", in which she speaks to specialists from various disciplines. in 2020, a book named "Nerds Save The World" that unites all conversations was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch.
Sibylle Berg has written songs to her own plays as well as to other artists like Swiss singer Sina the lyrics for several songs by the Swiss singer Sina, In 2011, the song Ich Schwvara, written by Berg and sang by Sina, was the song of the year and the most played song at weddings in Switzerland.
Berg wrote the text Speed for Phillip Boa and the Voodooclub. Along with Rammstein and Element of Crime, Phillip Boa and the Voodooclub can be heard on the recorded reading of her novel Sex II.
From January 2016 to December 2017 she read her own satirical texts off-air ahead of the introduction of guests on the ZDFneo talk show Schulz & Böhmermann.

Director

In March 2013, Sibylle Berg co-directed with Hasko Weber Angst Reist mit at the Stuttgart Theater. That same year, The Berliner Festspiele honored her in "A Day with Sibylle Berg" where she directed a day-long event. In October 2015, she directed her play How To Sell A Murder House, at the Neumarkt Zurch Theater

Educational canon

In 2018 she collaborated with Simone Meier, Hedwig Richter, Margarete Stokowski and seven others to produce the list Women You Need To Know,published in August by Spiegel Online and Watson.ch. The canon includes 145 women and three female artist groups, subdivided into science, technology, research, as well as politics, literature, and art.

Teaching work

Berg has been teaching dramaturgy at the Zurich University of the Arts since 2013.

Works in English