This year is the 100th anniversary of the death of the great Prague German writer Franz Kafka. Perhaps everyone knows his black and white drawings, such as The Man Collapsed at the Table. Kafka loved to draw, and as he remarked in a letter to his fiancée Felice Bauer in 1913, "drawing satisfied him more than anything else". Austrian comic book artist Nicolas Mahler had a similar minimalist style to Kafka. So he decided to celebrate the big anniversary with a comic biography of Kafka: apt, funny, and with a good knowledge of the details of Kafka's life and work.


Nicolas Mahler (*1969) is a comic book artist and illustrator. His comics, humorous joke drawings and illustrations have been published in Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the satirical magazine Titanic. He has won several awards for his work, including the Max and Moritz Prize for the best German-language comic (2010) and the Literary Houses Prize (2015). He has also written comic book adaptations of literary works including Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters, Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities and James Joyce's Ulysses. He lives and works in Vienna.