The mercurial, self-mythologising novelist and journalist Joseph Roth (1894-1939), author of the 20th-century masterpiece The Radetzky March, was the finest observer and chronicler of his age.
Roth’s biographer, Keiron Pim, has retraced his life from a troubled childhood in the town of Brody – now in Ukraine, then on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – to his unsettled years spent roaming Europe between the wars, including spells in Vienna, Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam. Roth’s decline mirrored the collapse of civilised Europe: in his last peripatetic decade, he opposed Nazism in exile from Germany, his wife succumbed to schizophrenia and he died an alcoholic on the eve of the Second World War.
In this course, Keiron will explain how he researched and wrote Roth’s chaotic life story, discuss how doing so enabled him to trace his own family’s roots in a Ukrainian shtetl, and explore the themes of fractured identity, Jewishness, antisemitism, displacement and opposition to nationalism that make Roth’s story so relevant to today’s world.
About Keiron Pim
Keiron Pim is the author of Endless Flight: the Life of Joseph Roth, the first English-language biography of the great early 20th century Austrian novelist and journalist, published by Granta Books in October 2022.
His previous book, Jumpin’ Jack Flash: David Litvinoff and the Rock’n’Roll Underworld (Jonathan Cape), was hailed as ‘the best debut’ biography of 2016 by Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian and as a Book of the Year by The Times. Previously he edited and introduced Into the Light: the Medieval Hebrew Poetry of Meir of Norwich (East Publishing, 2013), collaborating with the National Centre for Writing to publish this significant poet’s complete works in translation for the first time.
Keiron began his career as a journalist on the Eastern Daily Press and has since written for the Guardian, Daily Telegraph and the Spectator. Alongside his writing, he teaches for the National Centre for Writing and on the University of East Anglia’s MA in Biography and Creative Non-Fiction. He is married with three daughters and lives in Norwich.
