Image by Kai Müller
Marcel Krueger is a non-fiction writer, translator and editor. Through the prism of family history and his own existence as migrant he explores the tragedies and violence of European 20th century history and what these mean for memory, identity and migration today, in the tradition of 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 arts, pop culture, and especially place. Marcel is one of the editors of the Elsewhere Journal, and together with Anne Mager he 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, University of Bielefeld, Fuhrwerkswaage Kunstraum, the Enveritas Group and Pommersches Landesmuseum Greifswald.
Marcel is an experienced public speaker and has given talks on German-Polish history, train travel, slow travel and place writing in places like RTE Television and Radio, Newstalk FM, BBC Radio 5, Radio Olsztyn, the German embassy Dublin, the University of Warmia-Mazury, the University of Warsaw, the University of Wrocław, the Baltic Academy Flensburg, the University of Bydgoszcz, the University of Lublin, the University of Toruń, and the German foreign ministry in Berlin.
Marcel also teaches place and creative writing workshops, and has done so at the Irish Writers’ Centre, The Reader Berlin, the University of Bydgoszcz, the University of Lublin, the Albert Schweitzer Gymnasium Hürth, and the University of Toruń, amongst others.
Awards and recognition:
Marcel was 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. 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. In 2020, Marcel was awarded a residency at the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island, Ireland. In 2022, Marcel received the Tyrone Guthrie Center Regional Bursary Award from Create Louth.
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.
In 2009, together with the other contributors, he won the Irish Blog Awards for their writings in the Dublin Community Blog.
He lives in Dundalk in Ireland, and also sings in a heavy metal-band.