Iris Radisch

Iris Radisch (born 2 July 1959) is a German literature-journalist. Since 1990 she has written for the mass-circulation weekly newspaper, Die Zeit. More recently she has come to wider prominence through her television work.

Biography Iris Radisch was born in West Berlin (as it was known at that time). She attended university at Frankfurt and Tübingen, studying German studies, Romance studies and Philosophy. She then moved into journalism, working as a literary editor with the Frankfurter Rundschau, a mass-market daily newspaper. Her switch to Die Zeit came in 1990. As a regular contributor to the paper's Feuilleton (arts and literature) section she gained a reputation as a perceptive, original, but sometimes also starkly polemical literature critic, able to deliver her judgments with a rare level of authority. She remained a panel member till December 2001 when (temporarily, as it later turned out) the series came to an end. She also participated in a number of subsequent "one-off" episodes transmitted during 2005 and 2006 to celebrate anniversaries of Friedrich Schiller, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Heine und Bertolt Brecht.

During 2002/2003, she teamed up with the philosopher-journalist Gert Scobel, the longstanding moderator of the television arts magazine Kulturzeit, as an alternate presenter of the literary radio programme "Bücher, Bücher" from Hessischer Rundfunk.

Between 1995 and 2000, Radisch served on the jury for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, a literary prize centred on German language literature and awarded each year, since 1977, in Klagenfurt. She returned to the prize jury a few years later, chairing it between 2003 and 2007.

In 2007, Iris Radisch published her first book, "Die Schule der Frauen" (loosely "The women's school"). It was not the first time the title had been used, but Radisch's book covers and builds on more contemporary and pressing themes than the similarly titled works of Molière and Gide. The author illuminates her own experience of sustaining a professional career with her "career" as a mother of three small children by two different men. She "exposes modern myths" about the compatibility of family and profession. She discusses the semi-detached contributions of fathers.

Since April 2013, jointly with , she has headed up Die Zeits Feuilleton section.

Celebration In 2008 the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache awarded her the for her work on Die Zeit. In 2009 the French Culture Minister, Christine Albanel, made her a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres.

Output (selection)

Die Seele Europas und die kleine Heimat. Keiner kommt hier lebend raus. Zwei Texte. Wieser, Klagenfurt 2006. Die Schule der Frauen. Wie wir die Familie neu erfinden. DVA, München 2007. Taschenbuchausgabe (paperback edition): Goldmann, München 2008. Camus: Das Ideal der Einfachheit. Eine Biographie. Rowohlt, Berlin 2013. Taschenbuchausgabe (paperback edition): Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2014. Warum die Franzosen so gute Bücher schreiben: von Sartre bis Houellebecq. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2017.