The Museum Barberini hosts the Austrian poet, essayist, translator, novelist and playwright Raoul Schrott on April 20th. Dubbed by experts as "the polymath among writers," Raoul Schrott will present his latest project, the Atlas of the Starry Skies. For the first time, the constellations and associated narratives and myths of 17 cultures throughout human history will be brought together ranging from Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, and the Tuareg to the Maya, Inca, Maori, and Inuit. For over three years, Raoul Schrott has been exploring the "symbolic ceiling painting of the world," the "Sistine Chapel" of humanity. Endlessly vast and enigmatic, the starry sky has stirred the imagination and piqued the curiosity of mankind since time immemorial.

Raoul Schrott, born in 1964, studied literature and linguistics in Innsbruck, Norwich, Paris and Berlin. From 1986 to 1987 he worked as the last secretary of the surrealist poet Philippe Soupault and from 1990 to 1993 as a lecturer at the Istituto Orientale in Naples. After his stay in Paris, he wrote a doctoral thesis on Dadaism in Tyrol in 1921-1922 and retranslated the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Iliad of Homer into German. He received numerous awards, including the Peter-Huchel-Prize and the Joseph-Breitbach-Prize. His theses in connection with his translations of the Gilgamesh Epicand the Iliad have been the subject of intense debates among experts. His work First Earth. Epic (Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, 2016) reviews our current state of knowledge, ranging from the Big Bang to the creation of the earth, life, and humankind, and has attracted enormous attention. His project Atlas of the Starry Skies is supported by the Federal Cultural Foundation and will be released in 2023/2024.