“I [Always] Knew That I Wanted To Do Something With This Family Story, But I Didn’t Know What”: Nelio Biedermann On His Juggernaut Novel Lázár

He’s still at university, but Nelio Biedermann counts Patti Smith, Dua Lipa and Christian Kracht as fans of his breakout novel, Lázár. As it makes its way around the world, and with a film adaptation in the works, the Swiss author is adjusting to acclaim.

“I’m very excited,” Nelio Biedermann tells me, “because Dua Lipa just posted [my book] on her [Instagram] story like two hours ago.” The Swiss author of Lázár – an instant bestseller last year upon its original German release, now being translated into 25 languages – drops in this latest career update over halfway into our conversation. You could take that as a symbol that, yes, he is excited, but moments like these are becoming somewhat customary. Patti Smith, herself a writer and ardent book lover, also described Lázár as an “exquisite and masterly pronouncement that a gifted young writer walks among us.”

Biedermann’s growing rollcall of cosigns from musical icons is, in some ways, fitting. On the face of it, he appears to be an author in pop star proportions. The 22-year-old boasts boyband-esque good looks, is recognised weekly by fans on the street, and has found runaway international success before even completing his bachelor’s degree at the University of Zurich. “We have three years for the bachelor’s and then two years for the master’s, but I won’t do the master’s,” he notes. Continuing his studies would, after all, appear to be superfluous. 

Quite rightly, he hopes that people consider Lázár – a capacious 20th-century family saga, rooted in his paternal family’s heritage in Hungarian nobility – for its content, before the wunderkind characteristics being attributed to him thanks to his youth. “Of course, I’m also amazed by people who are good at something at a very young age,” he acknowledges. “For example, if you have someone who is very good at playing soccer and he’s only 16, that is very amazing. But my age should just be a byproduct or something that makes the book more interesting.” 

The gothic-indebted epic – technically his second novel, following Swiss-published 2024 debut Anton Wants to Stay – charts a fictional family’s turbulent fortunes from the Habsburg reign to the 1956 Hungarian revolt. Drawn from conversations with his late grandmother and great uncle, who themselves fled to Switzerland during the era, Biedermann’s ability to synthesise history, magical realism, lust, romance, political disintegration and flickering perceptions of reality into such a sensory pageturner have drawn comparisons with the early writings of European literary greats. Eurotrash author Christian Kracht is also a fan – an endorsement that seems to have registered with Biedermann most intensely. “He is one of my favourite writers of all time,” Biedermann tells me. However, “I even feel a bit ashamed that he read it because I know that he liked it, but I think that it’s just not good enough for him.” 

Biedermann’s microscopic precision and lofty self-standards are, indeed, more befitting of a meticulous, revered literary craftsman than the world of celebrity. And while he has been enjoying meeting audiences as he promotes Lázár in the countless territories it finds itself in – he’ll land in London days after our conversation, to mark the UK publication – he’d really like to get back to putting pen to paper. “In the end, my job really is to write,” he says. He’s also hoping, this summer, to make time for ample swims in the lake near the apartment he’s recently got the keys to after leaving home, as well as decorating. As he does so, readers around the world will be stepping into his story in their droves as the season unfolds. However, he can be counted on not to bathe in any adulation. “Of course, I enjoy the praise, and I’m very thankful for it, but I still think that I could have done better,” he smiles. Spoken like a true great. 

Andrew Wright: Hi, Nelio! Congratulations on Lázár’s British release. Is an English translation a big milestone for you? 

Nelio Biedermann: It is a big deal. Especially because it is so difficult, especially for German literature to get translated into English, and if there is a translation in English, then a lot of other translations will follow. 

AW: I’m really curious about your story. You’re currently studying at the University of Zurich. What is your bachelor’s degree in?

NB: German language (literature and linguistics) and film. 

AW: I’m guessing in your class, people are saying, “Nelio’s doing well…?”

NB: They are very interested in everything that I have to tell them from [the literary] world, because a lot of them want to work in the field. But I’m very glad that it hasn’t really changed how they treat me.

AW: Can you tell me about your early beginnings in writing? 

NB: I started writing when I was 16, during the pandemic. I had so much time, and as I started writing, I knew that I wanted to really become a writer. So I practised a lot, and then at the end of high school, I wrote a novel because we have to write a paper in Switzerland for graduation. For this, I won a prize from the city of Zurich.  And then I knew that I had this talent. And I wrote Anton Wants to Stay and sent it to all of the publishing houses in Germany and Switzerland that I knew. There was no response, apart from this one really small publishing house from Zurich. And they [published it]. 

AW: You have, on your father’s side, heritage in the Hungarian nobility. Was a story like Lázár always something you wanted to dive into? 

NB: The subject kind of always surrounded me since my childhood. Even before I started writing, I knew that I wanted to do something with this family story, but I didn’t know what. I didn’t have a vessel for it. I just immediately started to write about my family’s [true] story, as the people that I knew, under their real names. But I realised immediately that I wasn’t good enough yet [to do that], and that often I had better ideas for the story than history did. So the story that you read now is the fifth attempt. Over the years, I always came back to this story and tried it again, and then somehow, with this fifth attempt, it worked. But it was really important to change the name to Lázár and to really state that this is fiction and not biography. The characters are all fictional, but the historical events they experience are mostly factual. 

AW: When you were growing up, how did you learn about this history? Was it told to you often? 

NB: It was in all of the stories that my grandmother and my great-uncle used to tell me. And they had to tell them again and again, because for me, they were a bit like fairytales, because I didn’t realise that they were also very traumatic for them and that they had to experience all of these horrible things. So I had so much knowledge about these stories that when I started writing about the family, but then I also realised that there were a lot of blank spaces. And I really tried to fill these voids in the story with my imagination and with research. 

AW: How did conversations with your great uncle and grandmother inform the book’s creation? 

NB: Well, my grandmother passed away just before I finished the book. She was very important for finding the right tone, because in the end, she had dementia, and she spoke about her past in Hungary in the way that I wrote about it with all of these fairytale-like elements. For her, it was normal that, for example, people from back then visited her, which was, of course, not true because they were long dead. But she kind of mixed things up and mixed the facts with fiction in her mind. And that was really my goal to mix it the way she did in my story to really have the facts and the fiction next to each other, so that you really can’t tell what is fiction and what is reality.

AW: The characterisation of each of the different characters is so vivid. You really feel how they command the room or the tension that pervades the house. What did the process of outlining and then colouring them in look like? 

NB: I really don’t outline. I used to try to do this overview of all the characters and all of their stories, but I quickly stopped it, because I realised that I couldn’t before starting to actually write the book. I had the historical outline, and I knew that ‘this and this and this’ historical event should be part of the story, but how the characters react to these historical events was really created while writing. And often I really don’t know where the story is going. 

AW: What does your writing setup look like? Do you write at night time or in between lectures?

NB: I tried this very strict writing routine, but I couldn’t stick to it because, especially now with all the events and the travelling, I just don’t have a regular day-to-day life. But what really is important to me is that I really try to write every day and just be in touch with the story that I’m writing.

And then if I really don’t have any time, I’ll just try to write a few sentences every day. And that’s enough to be in touch with the story and not lose track. If I have time, I like to write in the late evening, when it’s quiet, and I feel like I don’t miss anything.

AW: Do you write in silence or do you listen to music? 

NB: No, it has to be silent.

AW: The film rights to Lázár have been bought by Berlin production company X Filme Creative Pool. Is there anything already in development? 

NB: They’re developing the manuscript for the screenplay. And I think, after that, the process really is to just get it financed. And if the financing is done, then it really starts to take off.

AW: Was that always an aspiration for you to have an adaptation? 

NB: Not really. I really didn’t think about a film adaptation while writing the book. I think the aspiration really was just to write as good as I can, and my goal was just to someday have a few translations. But I thought that that would be in the next 20 years, maybe a few translations into French and Dutch or something. It’s really surreal to have all of this only three years after my debut.

AW: Would you want to be involved in screenwriting for any Lázár adaptation? 

NB: I think I wouldn’t want to adapt a novel by myself into a screenplay, but rather just write a screenplay for something new, because I think it could be a bit frustrating if I get too involved in the process of turning it into a film. And also, I am very excited to see what they make out of my novel, because I think it is important that they make something new.

AW: Finally, congratulations also on your new apartment! How is the interior design going? 

NB: It’s going pretty well. I’m excited because it was a bit strange to fly to places like New York for the book promotion and then come back to my childhood bedroom. 

Lázár by Nelio Biedermann, translated by Jamie Bulloch, is published in the UK by Maclehose Press (via Quercus Publishing)