Akif Pirinçci

Akif Pirinçci — Biography

Akif Pirinçci emigrated to Germany with his family in 1969 and grew up in Weißenthurm in the Rhineland, writing scripts and radio plays while still in school. He self-published his first novel in 1980, but his real breakthrough came with the cat-detective story Felidae (1989), which grew into an eight-book series and gave him financial independence. From 2012 he began appearing regularly at right-wing populist and anti-Islam gatherings, gathering his views from that period into the 2014 book Deutschland von Sinnen. Xenophobic remarks he made at a 2015 Pegida anniversary rally in Dresden led his publisher, Amazon, and most German booksellers to pull his titles and cancel his contract. Convicted six times over statements found to constitute incitement to hatred, he was sentenced by a Dresden court in 2021 to four months in prison plus three years' probation, and in February 2024 a Bonn court handed him a harsher, non-suspended nine-month prison term on the same charge.