Marcel Krueger is a German-Irish writer, editor and translator. Through the prism of family history he explores the tragedies of Europe in the 20th and 21st century and what these mean for memory and identity today, especially focusing on Ireland, Germany and Poland. Marcel is inspired by writers like W.G. Sebald, Dubravka Ugrešić and Martin Pollack.
“A gifted writer of non-fiction” according to the Arts Council Ireland, his often melancholic writing is always deeply rooted in visual arts, architecture, and place overall. Marcel is one of the editors of the Elsewhere Journal, and together with Anne Mager founded the interdisciplinary arts project the corridor in 2017, which engages with the topic of borders and their political, social and cultural consequences.
His articles and essays have been published in the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 3:AM, the Irish Times, Slow Travel Berlin, Notes from Poland, and CNN Travel, amongst others. He has translated Wolfgang Borchert, Jörg Fauser and John Höxter into English and Gerður Kristný, Louis MacNeice and W.H. Auden into German, and his commercial translation clients include Gidsy, new talents - biennale cologne, the University of Bielefeld, the Fuhrwerkswaage Kunstraum Cologne, the Enveritas Group and the Pommersches Landesmuseum Greifswald.
Marcel is an experienced public speaker and has established himself as a subject matter expert on storytelling about European and especially German-Polish history and cultural memory. He is particularly interested in creatively sharing this knowledge, especially with young people. Marcel has organised and held lectures and history writing workshops at Radio Olsztyn, the German embassy Dublin, the Irish Writers Center, the University of Warsaw, the University of Wrocław, the Pilecki Institute Berlin, the University of Bydgoszcz, the University of Toruń, and the German foreign ministry in Berlin. amongst others.
Awards and recognition:
In 2022, Marcel received the Tyrone Guthrie Center Regional Bursary Award from Create Louth. In 2020, Marcel was awarded a residency at the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island, Ireland. In 2019, he was chosen as the official writer-in-residence of Olsztyn in northern Poland by the German Culture Forum for Central and Eastern Europe. Marcel was also chosen as a participant of the 2018 XBorders Accord project of the Arts Council Northern Ireland and the Irish Writers' Centre and is a graduate of the Matador New Media School for Travellers 2012. In 2009, together with the other contributors, he won the Irish Blog Awards for their writings in the Dublin Community Blog.
Together with Seamus Heaney, Roddy Doyle and other Irish writers Marcel currently holds the world record for ‘Most Authors Reading Consecutively From Their Own Books’ at the Irish Writers’ Centre.
He lives in Berlin, and also sings in a heavy metal-band.