Norris von Schirach

He published his first novel Pale Heroes (Blasse Helden) in spring 2018 with Knaus Verlag (Germany) under the pseudonym Arthur Isarin so that his well-known surname would not overshadow the work and readers as well as critics would receive it without bias; his authorship was only revealed six months after publication.

In his literary work he processed his experiences of the Yeltsin-years in Moscow, which were characterized by “privatization and the accompanying strengthening of the oligarchs as well as the slipping of large parts of the population below the poverty line” and which made Vladimir Putin’s system possible in the first place.

[2] "I wanted to capture the mood of those years”,[2] Norris von Schirach said in an interview with journalist Kerstin Holm.

Viktor Yerofeyev judged Pale Heroes: „Anyone who wants to understand Russia today should read Norris von Schirach - a bold literary adventure.”[3] New Books in German Fiction (US Jury Pick) mentions his „stark, moving and strangely beautiful prose".

It is about a commodities trader who is tasked with building a steel company in post-Soviet Kazakhstan [5] after „President Nazarbayev [...] transferred the bankruptcy assets of the Soviets into a kind of personal feudal system".