Foreign Rights

News

Irina Rastorgueva has won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2025 for non-fiction for her book Pop-up Propaganda. Epicrisis of the Russian Self-Poisoning.

Nora Schramm receives the Kranichstein Literature Prize 2024 and the Mara Cassens Prize 2024 for her novel Hollow Spaces.

Levin Westermann receives the Lower Rhine Literature Prize of the City of Krefeld 2024 and the Basel Poetry Prize 2025.

Katharina Winkler is shortlisted for the Austrian Book Prize 2024 with her book Seven Mile Heart.

Marie Luise Knott has been awarded the Johann Heinrich Merck Prize for Literary Criticism and Essay 2024.

Jens Balzer has been shortlisted for the Tractatus Prize 2024 for his essy After Woke.

Onur Erdur made it to first place on the non-fiction best list by ZDF, Deutschlandfunk Kultur and DIE ZEIT for the month of June with his book School of the South. The Colonial Roots of French Theory.

Ivna Zic has been awarded the Swiss Literature Prize 2024 as well as this year’s Sponsorship Award from the Canton of Zurich.

Guillaume Paoli has been awarded the Günther Anders Prize for Critical Thinking 2024 for his book Mind and Garbage. 

Recent Sales

After Woke by Jens Balzer: Spanish rights, Latin America (Biblos)

The Long Shadow of the Guillotine by László F. Földényi to Russia (AST)

The Burnout Society and Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han to Azerbaijan (Qanun)

Freud's Beasty Boys by Oxana Timofeeva to Turkey (Tetes)

The Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han to Romania (Contrasens)

Modern Animal by Yevgenia Belorusets to Sweden (Ersatz)

Male Phantasies by Klaus Theweleit to Korea (Geulhangari)

The Abuse of Property by Daniel Loick to French World (Éditions Sans Soleil)

The Long Shadow of the Guillotine by László F. Földényi to Spanish World (Galaxia Gutenberg)

The Utopia of Socialism by Klaus Dörre to Brazil (Boitempo)

Flies. A Portrait by Peter Geimer to French World (Éditions Macula)

The School of Seeing by Peter Betthausen to Russia (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art)

370 Riverside Drive, 730 Riverside Drive by Marie Luise Knott to French World (L'Arche)

Infocracy, The Transparency Society, Palliative Society and The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han to Uzbekistan (Nasim Kutub) 

The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han to Ukraine (Komubook)

Freud's Beasty Boys by Oxana Timofeeva to Norway (House of Foundation - H//O//F)

Surazo by Karin Harrasser: Spanish rights for Latin America (El Cuervo)

Pocahontas in Wonderland (vol. 1), The Book of the King’s Daughters (vol. 2), Why Cortés Really Won  (vol. 3) and “You Give Me Fever”. Arno Schmidt. Seascape Pocahontas (vol. 4 of the POCAHONTAS series) by Klaus Theweleit to English World (Rutgers University Press)

School of the South by Onur Erdur to English World (Polity) and French World (Éditions Arpa)

Ferns. A Portrait by Solvejg Nitzke to English World (Greystone)

Russia and the West by Katharina Bluhm to English World (Lynne Rienner Publishers)

The Yacht by Anna Katharina Fröhlich to Italy (Mondadori)

Ancestors by Anne Weber to English World (Indigo)

The Great Gopnik by Viktor Jerofejew to Czech Republic (Academia)

Macht und Entscheidung by Panajotis Kondylis to Russia (Ad Marginem)

The Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han: Arabic (Wasm)

How Rational Machines Became Romantic by Philipp Schönthaler: Chinese Simplex (Orient Publishing Center)

Annette: An Epic Heroine by Anne Weber to Sweden (Faethon)

Freud's Beasty Boys by Oxana Timofeeva to English World (Polity)

Seven Mile Heart by Katharina Winkler to Spanish World (Periférica)

Against Nature by Lorraine Daston to Denmark (Forlaget Slagmark)

The Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han to Taiwan, Chinese complex rights (Locus)

Banlieues. A Novel in Eighteen Forays by Anne Weber to Italy (Mondadori)

Manaschi by Hamid Ismailov to French World (Éditions Noir sur Blanc)

The Great Gopnik by Viktor Jerofejew to Finland (Siltala), Bulgaria (Janet 45) and Russian rights (ISIA Media Verlag)

Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han to Lithuania (Kitos Knygos)

Shadows on the Tundra by Dalia Grinkevičiūtė to Czech Republic (Argo)

Annette: An Epic Heroine by Anne Weber: Galician rights (Aira Editorial)

Matthes & Seitz Berlin is a German independent publishing house founded in 2004 by Andreas Rötzer that publishes about 100 titles per year in fiction and non-fiction. It was established in the tradition of Matthes & Seitz Munich, a publishing house founded by Axel Matthes and Claus Seitz in 1977.

The fiction list includes contemporary German-language authors, like Anne Weber (winner of the German Book Prize 2020), Frank Witzel (winner of the German Book Prize 2015), Joshua Groß, Esther Kinsky, Philipp Schönthaler, Lola Randl, Matthias Senkel, Anna Weidenholzer and Levin Westermann. Contemporary French authors such as Emmanuel Carrère, Constance Debré, Éric Vuillard, Mathieu Riboulet, Céline Minard, Nastassja Martin and Abel Quentin form another focus of the publishing house's literary program alongside Russian literature, including Viktor Jerofejew, Alexander Ilichevsky, Alexander Goldstein and Olga Slavnikova. In addition, Matthes & Seitz Berlin publishes classics in new translations by authors such as Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Benjamin Constant, Michel Leiris as well as multi-volume editions of works by Gerhard Rühm, Warlam Schalamow, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jean-Henri Fabre and Henry David Thoreau.

The extensive non-fiction program in the humanities with a focus on philosophy, political theory, anthropology, literature and cultural studies includes, among others Heike Behrend, who won the Leipzig Book Prize in the non-fiction category in 2020 with her book Incarnation of an Ape, Rebecca Solnit, Jürgen Goldstein, who also won the Leipzig Book Prize in 2015 with his biography of Georg Forster, Patrick Eiden-Offe, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Andreas Malm, Klaus Theweleit, Donatella Di Cesare and László Földényi.

The essay series Fröhliche Wissenschaft (Joyful Wisdom) has been published since 2007 and now comprises more than 240 volumes with texts by Byung-Chul Han, which have been translated into 35 languages, by Jens Balzer, Marcus Steinweg, Hannah Arendt, Hannes Bajohr, Roberto Simanowski, Judith N. Shklar, Alexander Pschera, Jean Francois Billeter, Luise Meier and Jule Govrin, among others. The essays offer historical and contemporary contributions and impulses for current political, philosophical and social debates.

In 2013, the first volumes of the Naturkunden (Natural Sciences) series edited by Judith Schalansky were published: lavishly designed books that passionately explore nature and thus prominently mark the program's focus on nature, movement in space and ecology. In addition to the beautifully designed portraits of animals and plants such as crows, donkeys, wolves, pigs, monkeys, oysters, rhinoceroses and nettles, which have been translated into many languages, the series also includes classics of nature writing, primarily from English-speaking countries (including J. A. Baker, Robert Macfarlane, Nan Shepherd, Aldo Leopold) and non-fiction as well as illustrated books (Korbinian Aigner, Jean-Henri Fabre).

Since 2017, the publishing house has been awarding the German Prize for Nature Writing together with the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation, the German Environment Agency and the Art and Nature Foundation to encourage new German-language literary and essayistic writing about nature.

To read more about Matthes & Seitz Berlin: Jürgen Boos in conversation with Andreas Rötzer