“There’s a long tradition,” explains the novelist Adam Ehrlich Sachs ’07, A.M. ’11, “of mathematics majors getting derailed by the Lampoon.” He cites the brainiacs behind Futurama as an example. But Sachs, an earth and planetary sciences concentrator thrust into the literary world after landing on The Harvard Lampoon his sophomore year, was likewise affected. “Writing was deeply repressed for me,” he says. “I had scientific forebears. I feel like I had to try basically everything else first.”
Sachs recalls an episode his senior year when he was sitting “with a very nice professor in a very ugly building at MIT,” writing a thesis on hurricane dynamics, while his friends from the Lampoon “prepared for Hollywood careers and got drunk in a mock Flemish castle [the Lampoon building on Bow Street].” Writing, Sachs decided, was the thing. He flirted briefly with screenplays and returned to Harvard for a master’s degree in the history of science. Three full-length works of fiction followed—also numerous short stories—and in February 2026, Sachs was named a recipient of the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, which comes with an unrestricted grant of $175,000.
The prize committee called Sachs’s writing “a bravura exploration of the history of knowledge in all of its absurdity, strangeness, and difficult beauty.” His most recent work, Gretel and the Great War (2024), knits together 26 alphabetized characters (the Architect, the Ballet Master, the Choirmaster, and so on) who have historic parallels in early twentieth-century Vienna. In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Sachs spoke about that novel, his writing philosophy, and the road to becoming a prize-winning author.
What made you return to Harvard for your master’s degree after you’d hit the end of the road with screenwriting?
I’ve always loved fiction. And I started to realize that I didn’t really have the philosophical or humanistic or historical context to deal with the books that I liked. I liked Beckett and Kafka, but I didn’t know what I was doing when I was reading them. I’d done some social science in college, but I never really had an English or history education. I got what I wanted when I went back. I had some brilliant professors and got to read a lot.
I actually did a master’s and another year toward the Ph.D., so I took general exams. That was terrifying. It forced me under pain of social death to read a ton. I’m grateful for it. But when it came time to give a dissertation topic, I realized I didn’t want to be a historian of science. I had to tell my poor parents I was quitting again. And since then, I’ve been writing fiction.
You begin Gretel and the Great War by displacing the narrator. We learn that a man in a sanatorium, now dead, wrote these stories and sent them to his daughter as bedtime tales. The point of view is apocryphal, or untrustworthy, a bit like the narrator in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. What appeals to you about this literary strategy?
For some reason, I feel a great deal of shame while writing; I’m always looking for oblique ways to distance myself from what I’m talking about, even though ultimately I just want to talk about whatever my obsessions are. No one actually believes the framing. Ultimately, I just want to play. And to do that I need to interpose all these levels between myself and the actual sentences, usually at the beginning of a book. I can’t start writing at all until I have those defense mechanisms in place.
A handful of these stories take place in historic coffeehouses around Vienna. What do you know about those shops? And which Cambridge-area coffeehouse is most reminiscent of that century-old European intellectual style?
I was actually just in Cambridge, and I was looking for [Café] Pamplona, but it was gone. In Vienna, at least in the first district, a lot of the coffeehouses are now museums. Café Central always has a long line of tourists.
One thing that attracted me to this milieu, that’s attracted a lot of people to the coffeehouses, is the fact that all of these disparate fields were in communication in a way that is impossible now. Physicists were influencing writers and artists, who were in communication with philosophers. In that sense, I’m not sure there could be a Harvard Square coffeehouse like that [today]. As a cultural fact, we’re all so siloed now. Scientists wouldn’t be conversant with literature. And the artists would have no idea what the physicists were doing.
Midway through the book, I realized some of these unnamed characters must have historical parallels. I read an interview where you said that, in fact, all of them do. Why stick to that plan?
[The characters] were all real Viennese people. This is kind of an Oulipian thing for myself, one of my constraints. [Oulipo references a French literary movement wherein writing rules are introduced to spur a story’s creativity.] I had the alphabetical constraint obviously, but another was that each character had to have a historical reference.
Some of them were very famous. A, the architect, was Adolf Loos, who designed a building that faced the castle and, by the standards of the time, was considered obscenely plain. Parallels like that are clear. And then others, less so. Finding someone for each letter was like a puzzle-making aspect for me, and kind of generative.
How did the Windham-Campbell Prize come about? Do you apply for it? Tell me a bit about how and when you heard.
You don’t apply for it. You don’t know you’re under consideration. I knew of it because I wanted it, like everyone. [Laughs.] But I would never in a million years have guessed. It was truly an insane shock. I just got an email out of the blue. I really don’t have many readers. And I don’t get much email. I feel like I’m in a vacuum most of the time. But I check my email religiously. So to get that one was crazy.
