The academy has 420 members in art, architecture, literature, performing arts, film and music. It is based in Berlin and was founded in 1696 by Frederick I of Prussia.
A large part of the members are German-speaking, such as the author Herta Müller and the director Michael Haneke, but there are also non-European members such as Jonathan Franzén, Bob Dylan and Ai Weiwei.
Aris Fioretos made his debut in 1991 with the prosaic “Book of Deland”. He has written novels and essays, but also translated works by, among others, Friedrich Hölderlin and Vladimir Nabokov. For a period he was Sweden’s cultural councilor in Berlin. This autumn he will publish the novel “The Thin Gods”.