Liechtenstein

Seven Years in Tibet, Heinrich Harrer
Sieben Jahre in Tibet. Mein Leben am Hofe des Dalai Lama

As you might imagine, finding authors from postage-stamp microstates can be quite a challenge. Drawing from an already tiny population, the pool of potential authors is seriously restricted. And when you add the need for a work in translation, it's almost a Sisyphean task to find entries for places like Liechtenstein, Monaco, or San Marino.

When I started my world-reading project, I was interested to see what Ann Morgan had come up with for some of these tough countries and scrolled through her list. I was a bit stunned to see Seven Years in Tibet listed for her Liechtenstein entry, not only because I had already read the book, but because I seemed to remember the author being Austrian. Indeed, Heinrich Harrer was born in Austria, but lived in Liechtenstein for a big part of his life and wrote Seven Years in Tibet there. Since no native-born Liechtenstein author is available in English translation – despite the fact that Liechtenstein author, Iren Nigg, had won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2011 – Harrer's Seven Years in Tibet will have to do.

Seven Years in Tibet is Harrer's autobiographical account of his escape from an interment camp in British India during the Second World War into the Himalayas to Tibet, a hermetic kingdom with virtually no contact with the outside world at the time. Harrer spent several years in Tibet and became a tutor and friend to the Dalai Lama.

The book is very evocative, describing a world that moved at a different pace and revolved around different poles. The Dalai Lama said Seven Years in Tibet introduced hundreds of thousands of people to Tibet.