Performance Database

The writer and director Tankred Dorst was born in Oberlind near Sonneberg and studied German and art history at the University of Bamberg, before going on to read theatre studies in Munich. His first plays were staged in Lübeck and Mannheim in 1960 and immediately marked him out as a distinctive voice in the theatre, laying the foundations for a reputation that has kept his name in the public eye ever since. It is a reputation that he owes not only to his stage works but also to his prose writings and films. By 1963 he was already a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Art. His wife, Ursula Ehler, has worked with him since the early seventies as his assistant and co-author. Tankred Dorst’s work has also received attention abroad, leading to visiting professorships in Australia and New Zealand in 1973. In 1978 he became a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry in Darmstadt and in 1983 was elected to the Academy of Science and Literature in Mainz. He received the Büchner Prize in 1990. As an internationally acclaimed German dramatist, he lectured on poetics as a visiting professor at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main in 2003/4. In 2006 he was awarded the Samuel Bogumil Linde Prize, which he received in the wake of a whole series of other important awards.