Albrecht Behmel

Albrecht Behmel is a German artist, novelist, historian, non-fiction writer and award-winning playwright.

After working as a bouncer and a puppeteer in Paris, France, in the early 1990s, Behmel moved to Germany to complete his studies in humanities in Heidelberg, where he was a fellow student of Silvana Koch-Mehrin and Gerrit Jasper Schenk and at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. He has published on ancient history, Greek naval warfare and early German literature like the Nibelungenlied. Most notably, however, are a series of self-help e-books for fellow students, making him one of the pioneers of German electronic publishing. He used the pseudonym Timothy Patterson for two titles. He is noted to suffer from insomnia. He was a business consultant between 1995 and 2005.

His published work includes novels, like Mitte 1, Homo Sapiens Berliner Art; radio plays, computer games, film scripts and stage plays as well as non-fiction. He has worked for a number of German and international TV stations, like ARTE and ARD. Behmel founded a network for film and media professionals, Filmforum, in 2008.

In 2013 he founded Samiel Award, an annual literary prize for antagonists of newly published German novels. The first Samiel Award went to Austrian writer Jan Kossdorff for a dark humor novel about human trafficking and advertising agencies. The award is supported by publisher Marc Hiller of Stuttgart. Winning writers receive 666 Euros, the number of the beast.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023