Heinrich Steinfest

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Heinrich Steinfest is a German-speaking writer of crime novels, born in Australia. Shortly after his birth, his emigrant parents moved back to their native Vienna where he lived until moving to Stuttgart a few years ago. His novels are bizarre examples of events passing beyond interpretation or analysis, his most formidable character being Cheng, a Viennese detective with no ties to China whatsoever, born in Vienna to Chinese parents driven there by their enthusiasm for the Viennese waltz. An allegory about the author's own birth in a country sometimes mistaken for the one he still lives in, psychologically - Austr(al)ia.