Ralph Tharayil
- Germany -
Ralph Tharayil was born in Switzerland in 1986 to South Indian parents. He is a writer, director and translator whose work moves between literature, performance and audio. He studied History, Media Studies and Literary Studies at the University of Basel.
His literary debut, Nimm die Alpen weg (Take the Alps Away, 2023), received wide critical acclaim and was awarded the prestigious Alfred Döblin Medal. The book established Tharayil as one of the most distinctive new voices in contemporary German-language literature, recognised for the musical precision of his prose, his radical use of collective perspective and his subtle exploration of childhood, migration, family, language, desire and belonging. Alongside his own writing, Tharayil also works as a translator. His translation of Kopano Maroga’s poetry collection Jesus Thesis is forthcoming with Akono Verlag. Ralph Tharayil lives and works in Berlin.
On the Work of Ralph Tharayil
Ralph Tharayil’s work occupies a rare and compelling space between prose, poetry, performance and sound. Although his literary debut Nimm die Alpen weg (Take the Alps Away) is formally a novel, its language often behaves like a poem: compressed, rhythmic, sensuous and exact. Tharayil writes with an ear for cadence and silence, for repetition and variation, for the almost musical return of images, gestures and bodily sensations. His sentences do not explain the world from a distance; they allow the reader to enter it through breath, sound, touch and movement.
At the centre of Nimm die Alpen weg is the voice of children — more precisely, a collective “we”. This “we” is one of the book’s most striking poetic and ethical inventions. Before the children are separated into fixed identities, before the world names them according to gender, origin, role or expectation, they exist in a shared field of perception. They experience the world together: through their bodies, through play, through fear, through curiosity, through the landscapes and margins of their Swiss childhood. The “we” becomes a form of resistance against the categories imposed from outside. It allows Tharayil to write childhood not as innocence, but as intensity — a state in which language, body and world have not yet been fully divided.
The landscape of the book is at once concrete and symbolic. The Alps, visible in the distance, are not merely scenery. They stand for the monumental narratives of Swiss belonging, purity, stability and national self-image. To “take the Alps away” is therefore to disturb a whole order of perception. It means asking what remains when the grand background disappears: the cramped apartment, the working parents, the children on their bicycles, the landfill, the reeds, the telephone booth, the small rituals of family and play. Tharayil’s prose turns these places into charged poetic spaces, full of sound and danger, tenderness and violence.
The family in Nimm die Alpen weg is marked by labour, migration, aspiration and pressure. “Ma and Pa” work relentlessly, driven by the hope of social mobility and by the desire to give their children a different life. Their exhaustion becomes a form of discipline; their love is inseparable from expectation. The children live between languages, between inherited structures and the world in which they are growing up. Yet Tharayil avoids any simple opposition between cultures. His work is not a schematic story of East and West, tradition and freedom, parents and children. Instead, he writes the more complex and painful space between generations: the place where care becomes control, where sacrifice becomes violence, where belonging is never stable and never innocent.
One of the great strengths of Tharayil’s writing is that it refuses psychological simplification. The prose does not reduce its characters to explanations. It does not translate every gesture into trauma, every image into symbol, every silence into a clear moral lesson. Instead, it preserves ambiguity. Violence, tenderness, shame, desire and play coexist. The children are vulnerable, but not passive; they are exposed to power, but also invent their own forms of perception and escape. In this sense, Tharayil’s work is deeply political without becoming programmatic. It shows how bodies are read by others — through skin, hair, language, gender, class and origin — while also insisting that something in the body and in language remains unreadable.
Desire and naming are central to the book’s poetics. The children encounter the gaze of others: the gaze of parents, classmates, strangers, institutions, cameras and social expectations. Yet Tharayil is especially interested in what escapes the gaze. His literature opens a space for the invisible: for the inner life that cannot be documented, filmed or categorised. Against the apparent truth of the visible, he places the truth of literary perception — a truth that is unstable, intimate and embodied.
In Nimm die Alpen weg, the emergence of the “I” from the “we” is not presented as a simple coming-of-age triumph. Individuation is necessary, but also dangerous; it brings freedom, but also separation. Tharayil’s achievement lies in holding this tension open. His prose does not resolve childhood into adulthood, family into emancipation, or silence into confession. Instead, it allows the reader to remain inside the trembling moment before everything is named.
Ralph Tharayil’s work is therefore best understood as a poetics of thresholds: between languages, generations, bodies, landscapes and forms. His writing is lyrical without ornament, political without declaration, intimate without voyeurism. With Nimm die Alpen weg, he has created a work of extraordinary precision and resonance — a book that listens to the hidden music of childhood while exposing the structures that shape, wound and transform it.
Poetry
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tigris / (Untitled)
