Thor Kunkel, a German author, was born in Frankfurt am Main on 2 September 1963. Kunkel claims to have spent his youth associating with drug friends and American soldiers stationed in the then West Germany. In 1981, on a scholarship to the United States, he enrolled in the creative writing programme of the San Francisco Art Institute. Following his return to West Germany, Kunkel joined the staff of advertising agency Young & Rubicam, then in 1988 joined the Swiss GGK in London, England. After marrying Dutch artist Gerda Bakker, he moved to Amsterdam in 1992 and re-joined Young & Rubicam as creative director, quitting in 1996 to take up directing and writing. He now lives in Switzerland and the Netherlands. His first novel, The Blacklight-Terrarium (1999), won him a major German literary prize. His 2011 novel Subs has been put into film and with the same title by director Oskar Roehler. Biography Thor Kunkel's debut novel The Black Light Terrarium (original title: Das Schwarzlicht-Terrarium) - awarded with the Ernst Willner Prize in 1999 - layers a variety of tragic-comical stories around synthetic drugs, disco and the American dream imported by G.I.s on the historical reality of the 1970s. In his dialogues, Kunkel mixes the jargon of "Hessian" hicks with G.I. slang to create a highly literary gutter language. Referring to Kunkels first novel, Martin Walser wrote appreciatively: "The author seems to be a naming obsessive, a virtuoso of disgust, a master show-off, a sexual fundamentalist." Kunkel's second novel, A Letter to Hanny Porter (original title: Ein Brief an Hanny Porter), set on Hawaii, is a dialogue-driven show down between four characters on the down side of the "American dream." The German TV station NDR compared the novel to a "Brechtian didactic play." After a play version by the Leipzig Schauspielhaus in 2002, the novel, set in Hawaii, was produced by MDR as a radio play starring Andrea Sawatzki in a lead role. Kunkel's third novel Final Stage (original title: Endstufe), funded by a grant from the Stiftung Preußische Seehandlung, was controversially discussed in the international press even before its official publication date. Its publication led to a fierce scandal and a lasting rift between the author and the German feuilleton. On April 15, 2004, in Die Zeit, Iris Radisch called the novel "the avant-garde of the biotechnical age. (...)The Berlin Banana Republic in NS Design." The FAZ journalist Dirk Schümer,