Klaus Modick

[1] Modick spent five years as an advertising copywriter and worked as a part-time lecturer in German literature in the higher education sector before becoming a freelance writer and translator in 1984.

[4] Modick is also an essayist and literary critic and has published several volumes of non-fiction writings including Das Stellen der Schrift, Milder Rausch and Ein Bild und tausend Worte.

Many of Modick's novels are concerned with German–American themes, for example, Die Schatten der Ideen, which tells the story of a German historian who emigrates to the US in 1935 and later finds himself swept up in the witch-hunts of the McCarthy Era.

[5] As a literary translator Modick has translated numerous English-language works into German including works by Aravind Adiga, Sebastian Faulks, William Gaddis, William Goldman, Sudhir Kakar, Victor LaValle, Andrew Motion, Jeffrey Moore, John O'Hara, Robert Olmstead, Matt Beynon Rees, Charles Simmons, Robert Louis Stevenson and Nathanael West.

Modick's 2015 novel Konzert ohne Dichter, which tells of the difficult relationship between artist Heinrich Vogeler and poet Rainer Maria Rilke in 1905, became an almost immediate bestseller on publication.