Thanks to an Old-Fashioned Family Novel, This 22-Year-Old is Already a Literary Star in Europe - The New York Times

Just 22 and still a student, Nelio Biedermann has been compared to Thomas Mann thanks to “Lázár,” his sweeping family saga. “Most people expect a young person’s first book to be about their own life,” says Nelio Biedermann about the reaction to “Lázár.” Credit... Clara Watt for The New York Times Supported by By Thomas Rogers The 22-year-old Swiss writer Nelio Biedermann has strange memories of visiting his family’s old properties when he was a child. Although he grew up middle-class in Zurich, his father was the descendant of an aristocratic family in Hungary that had, at one point, sold jewelry to royalty, but whose holdings were later seized by the communist regime. “We would always travel to the castles that used to belong to us,” Biedermann recalled in a recent interview, describing them as “fairy-tale-like.” One property had been turned into a psychiatric institution whose walls were decorated with pictures of his ancestors. “The people there knew who we were,” he said. “I couldn

Just 22 and still a student, Nelio Biedermann has been compared to Thomas Mann thanks to “Lázár,” his sweeping family saga. “Most people expect a young person’s first book to be about their own life,” says Nelio Biedermann about the reaction to “Lázár.” Credit... Clara Watt for The New York Times Supported by By Thomas Rogers The 22-year-old Swiss writer Nelio Biedermann has strange memories of visiting his family’s old properties when he was a child. Although he grew up middle-class in Zurich, his father was the descendant of an aristocratic family in Hungary that had, at one point, sold jewe