IN THEIR WORDS
ROBINSON’S JAM: The German author Lutz Seiler believes “the fight for survival...is something everyone can relate to.”
SCRIBE
FOR MANY BRITISH children growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the first taste of Robinson Crusoe was a television series with haunting theme music and Robert Hoffmann playing the castaway. Reading Daniel Defoe’s great novel of 1719 came later. So it was for the German writer Lutz Seiler. His first taste of the story was a TV adaptation he saw at age 7; he read the book when he was 14, growing up in East Germany. At 51, he published his debut novel, and took Defoe for his starting point. Kruso, published in