Paul Hawkins
Paul Hawkins is - according to the numbers - a full-grown British “adult.” While he participates begrudgingly in the economy as a humourist - the minimum viable job - he prefers to spend his time luxuriously faffing and/or travelling the world in search of an elusive and undeserved retirement. To this end, his life-long pilgrimage to avoid a “proper” job has deposited him in the Holy Mecca of Delayed Responsibility-Seekers: Berlin. He continues to write and draw things (mostly reluctantly as deadlines loom), just as the boringly villainous institutions of adulthood continue to hound him… except now in the far more terrifying German language.
His books include the Der Spiegel bestseller Denglisch for Better Knowers (Ullstein, 2013), iHuman: a User’s Guide (C.H. Beck, 2014), Avoiding Adulthood (C.H. Beck, 2016), The Bloody British (Goldmann Random House, 2017) and How to Take Over Earth (Ullstein, 2017). The latter title is forthcoming in the original English.
“Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.”