An extraordinary act of literary finesse [with] tinkling little notes of comedy.
— Joan Acocella, The New Yorker
Every cigarette I’ve ever smoked now seems, in retrospect, like little more than preparation for this remarkable essay.
— Leslie Jamison
A satisfying wisp of an essay about tobacco, addiction, first cigarettes, last cigarettes, breathing, kissing, hypnosis, literature, memory, and marking time ...
— Harper's
A wonderfully meandering memoir, beautifully written.
— Wall Street Journal
Hens' lapidary prose will sometimes put you in mind of the chain-smoking Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ...
— The New York Times
In a book that is as much a paean to smoking as it is a eulogy, Hens is both poetic and unforgiving about the pleasures and pains of smoking.
— Kirkus Reviews
This intelligent, literary volume plumbs Mark Twain, Italo Svevo and Van Morrison. But make no mistake: Nicotine isn’t a self-help book. It’s not an anti-smoking screed. Nor is it a love sonnet to tobacco. It’s an honest exposition of the emotional complexity of quitting.
— The Washington Post
Despite qualms that the last cigarette might extinguish his access to literarily fertile material, Nicotine is proof positive that Hens still has the stuff.
— The San Francisco Chronicle
Smoking is bad for you, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.
— Economist, 'Books of the Year 2017' Selection
Read an excerpt here (The New Yorker)
I was born in 1965 in Cologne and currently live in Berlin (Kreuzberg). There were several stops in between: Goch/Lower Rhine, where I attended an all-boys Catholic boarding school; La Calamine (Belgium) and Hamburg, where I tried to recover from the boarding school experience; Bonn, where I studied syntax and philosophy of language; Berkeley (California), where I earned a PhD in linguistics; Columbus (Ohio), where I taught German literature and linguistics for 17 years. I write fiction and nonfiction and translate literature from English and Dutch to German. I teach Creative Writing, Urban Studies, Hypermodernism, and related topics at the Free University in Berlin.
My essays have appeared in Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung, die ZEIT, Süddeutsche Zeitung und The New Yorker, among others. My book Nicotine was translated into French, English and Spanish. The City and the World (2021), my second work of creative nonfiction, will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (London), translated by Jen Calleja.