Nominated for German and Austrian Book Award 2021

After her sensational success with DIE BAGAGE, you will find Monika Helfer’s latest novel DADDY among the candidates for both the German and the Austrian Book Award 2021!

We called him Daddy. That’s what he wanted. He thought it sounded modern.”

Monika Helfer continues the tale she began in The Riff-Raff – the one of her family. Daddy is a memoir that also pens a portrait of a post-war generation. It is a novel about growing up in difficult circumstances and the author’s search for her roots.

He had a prosthetic leg, was often absent, was a widower, a pensioner and loved literature. Monika Helfer’s book orbits her father’s life and tells the story of her childhood and adolescence – the spaciousness and library in the mountain recovery home for war victims and the poverty and the cramped conditions in a South Tyrolean settlement with many children in one kitchen. She writes what she knows about her father, a man who, like many of his generation, didn’t say much.


With great veracity, the result is a novel that gently unfolds existential matters and traces painful memories. “Yes, everything turned out fine. In a terrible way, it all turned out fine.”

Rights to the images are with (c) Carl Hanser Verlag.