Raoul Schrott

Raoul Schrott is a traveller in the world of languages of astounding learning and virtuosity. How can language grasp the intangible, how can it unlock distant worlds and sacred regions? »The images one creates are ultimately deceptions, emblems of an inability to reach the objects themselves. The desire to do that, however, is what justifies the enterprise; by permanently questioning, that’s where truth lies.«

The poetic cosmopolitan Raoul Schrott was born in Tyrol in 1964 and studied literature and languages in Norwich, Paris, Berlin and Innsbruck. From 1986 to 1987 he was secretary to the surrealist Philippe Soupault and from 1990 to 1993 lector at the Istituto Orientale in Neapel. In 1997 he became a Professor at Innsbruck University’s Institute of Comparative Literature. His version of the Iliad caused a furore in 2008, with his theses about Troy provoking strong and polarized debate.

Schrott is the author of many books including The Lop Nor Desert, Tristan de Cunha or Half of the Earth, Handook of Cloud Cleaning, Homer’s Homeland. The Battle for Troy and its Genuine Causes. He has also written new translations and versions of The Bacchae, the Epic of Gilgamesh and The Iliad. His 1997 anthology The Invention of Poetry: Poems from the first four thousand years leads us into the origins of verse-making and is a phenomenal argument in support of poetry.

Raoul Schrott is the recipient of numerous awards including the Leonce and Lena Prize, the Berlin Literature Prize and the Joseph Breitbach Prize. He lives in Ireland.