Franz Innerhofer stormed the literary scene in the German-speaking world with his highly acclaimed first novel, Schöne Tage (translated as Beautiful Days, 1976), in 1974. He was immediately awarded the Bremen Literature Prize, the Rauriser Literature Prize, and the Sandoz Prize and was regarded as one of the most important and exciting young authors writing in German.

Innerhofer was born on 2 May 1944 in the small Alpine village of Krimml, near Salzburg. He was the illegitimate child of Elise Bernhard, a farm girl, who put him in foster care for two years, then got married and raised him until he was six. At that point he was sent to live at the farm of his natural father, who no longer wanted to pay child support. For the next eleven years, by his own account, Innerhofer was subjected to brutality, incredibly hard work, exclusion from the family, and a childhood...