Christoph Ransmayr - No Matter Where, Baby

In remembrance of the classic photo album, where the adventures of the moment were documented in keywords beneath often blurry images, Christoph Ransmayr tells seventy condensed stories in "Egal wohin, Baby" that are akin to micro-novels, based on seventy of his black-and-white photographs.

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Christoph Ransmayr — Recitation
Christoph Ransmayr

Christoph Ransmayr was born in 1954 in Wels, Upper Austria, and after years in Ireland and traveling, he now lives in Vienna. In addition to his novels "The Horrors of Ice and Darkness," "The Last World," "Morbus Kitahara," "The Flying Mountain," "Cox or The Passage of Time," "The Master of Cases: A Short Story about Killing," and "The Atlas of an Anxious Man," he has produced various narrative forms, including "Ladies & Gentlemen Underwater," "Confessions of a Tourist," "The Wolf Hunter" (co-authored with Martin Pollack), and "Medicine Against Mortality." In 2022, he published the collection of poems and ballads "Under a Sugar Sky" (illustrated by Anselm Kiefer), and in 2024, the story collection "When I Was Still Immortal," as well as the volume "Egal wohin, Baby" featuring the author's photographs. A volume titled "Report by the Fire" was published about Christoph Ransmayr's work.

For his books, which have been translated into more than thirty languages, he has received numerous literary awards, including those named after Friedrich Hölderlin, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, and Heinrich von Kleist, the Premio Mondello, and, together with Salman Rushdie, the Prix Aristeion of the European Union, the Prix du meilleur livre étranger, and the Prix Jean Monnet de Littérature Européenne, most recently in 2023 the South Korean Park-Kyung-ni Prize.

Egal wohin, Baby
Seventy images, seventy stories, seventy literary masterpieces

Here, one makes their life visible in snapshots, narratively traversing continents and times, capturing the fleeting moment sometimes with irony, but always with passion and virtuosity.

In remembrance of the classic photo album, where the adventures of the moment were documented in keywords beneath often blurry images, Christoph Ransmayr tells seventy condensed stories in "Egal wohin, Baby" that are akin to micro-novels, based on seventy of his black-and-white photographs. Each photo serves as an optical note, owed to the randomness of presence and recorded in passing with a smartphone or digital camera. Each text accompanying the image becomes a self-contained, polished piece of prose: a micro-novel.

For even in just a few lines, one can tell of expeditions into the moments of reality and the boundlessness of imagination—especially when it is done with the observational skill and artistry of formulation of the world-traveled Christoph Ransmayr.