Lukas Bärfuss | Granta

Lukas Bärfuss

Lukas Bärfuss, born in Thun, Switzerland in 1971, is one of the most successful dramatists to emerge in recent years, and his plays are staged all over the world. Bärfuss was voted playwright of the year in the critic poll featured by the magazine “Theater heute” in 2005. For his first novel “Hundert Tage” (One Hundred Days), which was published in Germany in 2008, Bärfuss was awarded the Mara-Cassens Prize, the Schiller Prize and the Erich-Maria-Remarque-Friedenspreis Prize. He was also nominated for the German and Swiss Book Prize.

Publications

One Hundred Days

Lukas Bärfuss

Translated by Tess Lewis

When Swiss aid worker David Hohl arrives in Rwanda in 1990, he wants to know what it feels like to make a difference.Instead, he finds himself among expats, living a life of postcolonial privilege and boredom, and he begins to suspect that the agency is more concerned with political expedience than improving lives. But are his own motives any more noble?When civil war breaks out and David goes into hiding, he is forced to examine his own relationship to the country he wants to help and to the cosmopolitan Rwandan woman he wants to possess. As the genocide rages over the course of one hundred desperate days, the clear line David has always drawn between idealism and complicity quickly begins to blur.