Jesus Christ Kinski

A bold and brilliant short work by the author of the Goldsmiths Prize-winning Cuddy

November, 1971. Berlin, Germany. Opening night.

Klaus Kinski, Germany’s most controversial actor, steps into the spotlight to a crowd of thousands.

After years of making movies abroad, he has returned to the stage for a much-publicized one-man performance about Jesus Christ. As the crowd turn on him and violence is threatened, it is also very nearly his last. After this week, he will never perform on stage again.

Exactly fifty years later, a hypochondriac writer, housebound by winter snowstorms, becomes fixated with video footage of Kinski at his most manic.

In this forensic analysis, he strays into the darker corners of modern culture, and finally begins to understand the compulsive urge that drives artists to the edge of sanity in their pursuit of perfection.

Jesus Christ Kinski is a novel about a film about a performance about Jesus. It is a daring act of literary ventriloquism, a meditation on censorship, creativity, loneliness – and just how far our tolerance is tested by bad people who make great art.

Praise for Benjamin Myers
‘One of our finest, and most deftly imaginative, writers’ i news
‘Radical and gorgeous’ Max Porter
‘A writer of extraordinary and incandescent talent’ Alex Preston

Praise for Benjamin Myers: 'Dizzyingly inventive Daily Telegraph
A visionary epic Guardian, Books of the Year 2023
It's hard to think of many people who can write with such attentiveness, tenderness and force about the importance of human connection and the redemptive power of art -- Wendy Erskine
One of the most interesting, restless writers of his generation Daily Mail

Benjamin Myers was born in Durham in 1976. He is the author of eleven books, including Cuddy, which was awarded the 2023 Goldsmiths Prize; The Offing, which was an international bestseller and selected for the Radio 2 Book Club; The Gallows Pole, which won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction and was adapted for a BBC series by Shane Meadows with A24. He has also published non-fiction, poetry and crime novels and his journalism has appeared in publications including the Guardian, New Statesman, TLS, Caught by the River and many more. He lives in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire.

benjaminmyerswriter.com / @BenMyers1

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