After Josef Winkler received the Georg Büchner Prize in Darmstadt on November 1, 2008, he gave a speech in gratitude, from which this book emerged. It answers some questions: Who is Josef Winkler? Where does he come from? What has shaped him? How did he become a writer? Why has he recently stopped feeling ashamed when he thinks about suicide every day? Josef Winkler, who grew up on a farm in a small Catholic village in Carinthia, where there were no books—except for the old, worn black prayer books that had a golden cross engraved on them, deeply embedded in the souls of children, which could be felt and touched with fingertips—tells of his early longing for language and images. With stolen money, he bought books by Camus, Hemingway, Sartre, and Peter.