Rowohlt Buchverlag

The Rowohlt Verlag has a long history, and it set out from its very beginnings to promulgate new voices and unconventional ideas and narrative modes. Its aim has remained the same ever since it was founded by Ernst Rowohlt in 1908, namely to provide a broad readership with good, well designed books. From the 1920s onwards American literature has been one of its core strengths, with a backlist stretching from Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Vladimir Nabokov right through to Jack Kerouac, John Updike, Toni Morrison, Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster, Jonathan Franzen and Thomas Pynchon. Thomas Wolfe remarked once that Rowohlt was an American publisher ‘that just happened to be located in Germany’, and indeed the constant updating of its list with striking perspectives from the Anglo-American world speaks for itself: Stewart O'Nan, Nicole Krauss, Colum McCann, Brit Bennett, John Wray, Sheila Heti and Rachel Kushner are all amongst the best and most prominent authors in their own countries. The list is supplemented by some of the greats of international literature such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Imre Kertész, Péter Nádas, Jon Fosse, Fernando Aramburu and Laurent Binet.
Thanks not least to the works of Kurt Tucholsky, Robert Musil and Hans Fallada, of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Peter Rühmkorf, Hans Joachim Schädlich and Elfriede Jelinek, Rowohlt has also always served as a decisive force in German literature. Since 2002, writers such as Georg Klein and Martin Walser, David Wagner and Heinz Strunk, Natascha Wodin and Eugen Ruge, Inger-Maria Mahlke, Edgar Selge and Daniel Kehlmann have further enhanced the profile of Rowohlt’s literature list.