Christian Kracht

Christian Kracht
Christian Kracht 2015 at Boston University
Born	(1966-12-29) 29 December 1966 (age 50) Saanen, Switzerland
Occupation	Novelist
Literary movement	Postmodernism
Spouse	Frauke Finsterwalder

Christian Kracht (German pronunciation: [ˈkraxt]; born 29 December 1966) is a Swiss novelist and journalist.

Kracht was born in Saanen. His father, Christian Kracht Sr., was chief representative for the Axel Springer publishing company in the 1960s. Kracht attended Schule Schloss Salem in Baden and Lakefield College School in Ontario, Canada. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, New York, in 1989. He is married to German film director Frauke Finsterwalder. They live in Los Angeles, California.

In the 1990s Kracht worked as a journalist for a number of magazines and newspapers in Germany, including Der Spiegel. In the mid-1990s he lived and worked in New Delhi as Spiegel's Indian correspondent. Kracht then moved to Bangkok, from where he visited various other countries in South East Asia. During this period he authored travel vignettes that were serialised in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper and later collated in the book Der Gelbe Bleistift (The Yellow Pencil) in 2000. In November 2006 Kracht was a regular columnist for the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His fortnightly column, which originally had the title Letter from..., later changed to Letter from the Past.

During this time, together with American businessman David Woodard, Kracht reported on Aleister Crowley's erstwhile residence in Cefalù.