On 20 Years of THE BOOK THIEF: An Interview with Markus Zusak

Markus Zusak: Oh, the old pitch. It’s like when you finish a book, and people say, oh, what’s it about? Every author or every writer just freezes in that moment and says, oh, my God. And in this case, I’ve had 20 years to think about it.

I still often go with the idea that I would when I was writing this book, and it kept getting bigger and bigger. I just thought no one is going to read this book. It’s going to be my least successful book. So here’s the first pitch, I suppose, more other people pitching it to their friends if they’ve read it and if, by chance, they liked it. They’d say, “You’ve got to read this book, The Book Thief.” And the friend would say, “Well, what’s it about?” Then what do you do? You’ve got to say, “Well, it’s set in Nazi Germany. It’s narrated by Death. Nearly everybody dies. Oh, and it’s 560 pages long. You’ll love it.” Every now and again, I think of that as the pitch.

I used to talk a lot about the things that happen in the book, but then finally I sort of hit upon this idea where I say it’s about the idea that in Nazi Germany, Hitler destroyed people with words. This is a story about a girl who steals the words back and writes her own story with them. Hopefully, the book is a beautiful story written amongst the ugliness of that world. To me, that’s what The Book Thief is about.

KJ: I think that description is perfect and it’s really kind of what I thought a lot about when I was considering what I wanted to ask you on such a huge anniversary for a YA book that has really stood the test of time and continues to be such a foundational text for anybody who wants to learn what YA is or who loves YA and wants to continue to see the category grow. When you reflect upon the book’s 20th anniversary, where and how do you think the book’s meaning has changed over the course of the last two decades, particularly when it comes to things like increasing global fascism? Or maybe another way to ask this is, do you think the book reads differently now in 2026 than it did in 2006?

MZ: I think there’s definitely a lot of yes and no in an answer to that question. There’s definitely a very strong argument to say that there was an element when the book first came out, a real sense of looking back, like looking back at something like Nazi Germany, and what happened there, whereas now there’s a sense of you could just be looking around.

Where you’ve got a world that’s swung back towards that sort of thing with autocratic power and misuse of power and all of those things being really prevalent. I think that in 2005, 2006, when the book came out, I remember being in New York when it came out and going to a concert for peace or something along those lines. We were sort of coming off the back of the second Gulf War as well. So I sort of think there’s always been this element in our lives and in the history happening around us. This idea that the world actually never stops. My intent when I was writing the book was never to come in from that moralistic point of view, not to come in from this is what I have to say about whether it’s World War II or the current state of politics. The primary focus is always great story. It is always great character and hopefully good writing. And so, the idea of the book being relevant now or reflecting what’s happening now, I think there’s definitely a truth in that.

I don’t think of that as something gratifying. It’s more just this idea of where you just sort of go, oh my God, humanity, it doesn’t stop. We’re always walking this line, whether it is in times of peace or times of great upheaval, where we’re asking ourselves, well, what’s my story going to be amongst this greater geopolitical landscape? What’s my story going to be when someone knocks on my door and needs my help? What am I going to do? That’s not necessarily how I set out to write The Book Thief, but I think you learn what the book is about as you’re writing it and then you learn more about it even 20 years after it’s come out.

KJ: Thinking about that, I mean, you couldn’t predict the future, right? I think that the same could be said when you think about that question, but give it a different context. I’m curious what you think about The Book Thief and its connection to the changing, evolving, and growing landscape of young adult literature over the last 20 years.

MZ: I was 16 when I tried to write my first book. I always joke that all eight pages of that attempt could be entered into a competition for the worst book ever written, although I never made the distance.

Then I wrote my first finished book when I was 18 or 19. That got rejected by publishers, and thank God it did. Same with a second book that I didn’t even send off because I knew it wasn’t good enough. It was too much like the first book.

Then I had a long fallow period of about three years during which I couldn’t write anything. I think that was a period where I was really growing and trying to find my own voice because I think first you’re just imitating your heroes. You’re essentially, I don’t want to say plagiarizing, but, it’s almost like fan fiction, where you’re sort of copying your favorite writers and you’re trying to meld together something that is your own style. I kind of learned at one point that what I didn’t want to do was to be an adult trying to mimic characters or the current trends of, say, the way teenagers speak. I wanted to be very particular about having my characters talk a certain way that was their own, not trying to fit in.

With a book like The Book Thief, there was always a bit of debate: is it a book for young adults? Is it a book for adults? To me, it never quite was a young adult book that was saying, okay, here’s a book for you as a teenager that is about you, that is in your voice, and that you can really relate to. To me, it was a book that said, “This is for you, but you’ve got to come up here to read it.” That’s not to say that it was of higher quality, but the themes were a little bit out of the realm of the everyday teenager. That’s something that’s stayed the same for me: I really try not to pay attention to whatever trends are. You can only write like yourself. No one else could have written that book, and that is always the goal.

That was a lesson I learned as a kid. I remember losing a race at athletics once and thinking that I’d won. I remember my dad saying to me afterwards, when I complained to him: “Yeah, I thought you won as well, but you made one mistake: you didn’t win by enough.” You just have to win by so much that they can’t take it off you. I liken that to writing in that I want to write a book so much like myself that nobody else could have written that book. Then you’re not comparing yourself in terms of quality, or whether you’re better, or more successful commercially, or winning awards, or whatever. It’s just like: try to do that.

That’s the thing with the book that I’ve sort of arrived at: whether it’s a good book, a bad book, or whatever it is, I know that no one else could have written that book but me. At some point, you stop, and you go, okay, think that’s enough. If it contributes to something like YA literature or adult literature or anything in between, you have to sort of settle for that.

You don’t get to choose how you’re successful at all as a writer, let alone how you’re successful, whether it’s throughout the world or in your own country or wherever. I’m kind of at peace with the idea that The Book Thief is just what it is now and wherever it settles. I think that’s the idea: to have a book, find a book, or write a book that has a reason to exist in the place where it lands.

KJ: I really like that answer, and I think that speaks to why the book continues to be what it is 20 years later. It was authentic to itself. It was authentic to your voice and the story you wanted to tell. That really nicely leads into my next question. Death is the narrator of this book, and while Death is indeed unfair and scary, one of the takeaways is that Death also has this element of care and love to it. This is a big question, of course, but I’m curious: which is that do you think Western culture has changed in how it perceives or grapples with death in the last couple of decades?

MZ: What’s really interesting to me is when this book came out–and it still happens to me today–sometimes somebody will come up to me, and whether it’s an older person or younger, they’ll say, I just want to thank you because of the Death that you portrayed, I’m not scared of dying anymore. I used to laugh and say, ” You know, I’m really happy for you because I’m still just terrified of dying.”

I think that’s actually swung around in the last 20 years, but not necessarily because I’m older. I just sort of think of the way we live and the highs and lows and the beauty and the fear and all the doubts of living. I think pinning the idea of death as such a terrifying thing is not what our experience of the world is.

I think we’ve got to address the idea of the lesser role that religion plays in a lot of people’s lives, and in that case, the surety of what happens after death and whether that’s good or bad. People aren’t necessarily following whatever religion is telling them in that sense. So there’s more of a grey area maybe in people’s minds.

One of the joys of writing the book was playing with the idea that death is like the missing piece of us. Well before I wrote the book, I remember talking to a friend who was telling me about an article or talking about the idea of death being so important in our lives because it’s what makes everything worth it. Knowing that we’re not going to be here forever is what puts a value on all of our experiences. So I kind of like to look at it that way, in that, okay, death is inevitable. I think there is maybe an element where we’re not treating death as such an awful thing to face. But I don’t like to speak for other people either, I suppose, but that’s how I feel about it.

KJ: One of the core elements of The Book Thief is the power of words and stories. Liesel is so moved by them that she steals them when the need arises. Can you talk a bit about the theme of books and words as power, as it relates to what we’re seeing right now with the ongoing rise in book censorship? It’s obviously been a wildfire in the U.S., but it’s not just in the U.S. We’ve seen similar attacks on books and reading in Scotland and Ireland and Russia and even Australia as well over the last half decade.

MZ: I remember when I was beginning to write The Book Thief, originally there wasn’t going to be a book burning. I just sort of thought, oh, no, that’s kind of too typical. I think that’s kind of what we’re expecting in a book like this. And then I just knew that it would really serve the story, or something else was going to happen. It wasn’t just a book burning. Something had to happen. It turned out that Liesel would steal a book from the ashes of the fire that hadn’t burned. I immediately thought, oh, that’s a good image of her, putting the book under her shirt or dress and she could feel it burning her a little bit. Then someone would see her steal it. It served the story first.

What I sort of came to realise is just how important stories are to us as a species. There are the stories we read and the stories we write and tell. But then there are the stories we make. What we do with our lives is our story or a collection of stories. And in terms of the idea of censorship, you’ve got this idea that stories are so sacred to us. We have these physical elements that keep us alive, the physiology of everything. But stories are actually what we’re made of. When you have people wanting to control that story, and then that’s a point of them wanting to control us.

What that does more than anything else, the worst thing about that is that it’s taking away the ability for us to listen to each other and to develop that sense of empathy that you get from hearing someone else’s point of view, even if you don’t necessarily agree with it or it’s an experience that you don’t understand.

What I love about the idea of novels is that you get to see the world in a way that’s totally foreign to you, and yet, you can place yourself in it. For that to be taken away–I totally understand why campaigning against censorship is so important because it’s robbing people of understanding other people. You see what that leads to. What’s happening now comes back to your first or second question about politics and the rise of fascism. A book like The Book Thief could have been written in the 1940s and could have been written in 2026.

KJ: What has been one of the most surprising experiences you’ve had in the last 20 years since this publication? Or what’s an experience that you’re most proud of when it comes to this book 20 years on?

MZ: The greatest gift has just been just readers turning up to a bookstore somewhere. Like, I remember being on trips to America and going to a bookshop somewhere that you’ve never heard of. You’re going there, and you’re just thinking, who’s going to show up to this? Is there going to be anyone here? Then there’s this great collection of people there.

Within that gift is the bigger one of when someone comes up to you and they say one of two things. They’ll either say, “I loved this book,” or “This is my favorite book.” That has been the most surprising thing over the years because I think of my favorite books growing up and what they meant to me, and even that I still reread today just because I love being in that world. I think about what that means to me, and then for someone to say to you, this is my favorite book. The funniest is when they then say, I’m sorry, I’m sure you hear this all the time. I could never get tired of hearing that. I could never! As a writer, there is nothing better than that.

Apart from the writing itself, when you get something to work that was troublesome, those little victories you have alone. But out in the world, that’s the greatest gift that I’ve been given. It’s been the most surprising thing, too: I love those readers for that.

And, you know, you even love the reader who comes up to you and says, yeah, that book, ah, congratulations, that’s going great. I just couldn’t get into it. So you take the good with the bad, that’s for sure.

KJ: I mean, it shows you they tried, right? And were interested enough to hear what you had to say, even if it didn’t quite land for them.

MZ: It’s quite funny, isn’t it? And then it’ll be, “Yeah, and you know, it wasn’t like I didn’t try, I tried several times.”

I don’t like to sit around and think of myself as some kind of artist or anything like that. I’m a tradesman. I go to work, and I sit down, and I’m in pursuit of an art form. What made me want to be a writer was being 14 years old and staying up all night to finish S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. It’s black words on a white page, but I was seeing it in color, and I was there. I was inside those pages. That’s just such a magic act. Forget all those magicians and things like that. To me, this was pure magic, real magic. To be able to do that for a living and then for someone to come up to you and say, oh, I love that. I felt so much during this book. That’s just the greatest. I realize what a privilege that is.

KJ: You’ve given such a beautiful answer, and it ties perfectly into my final question for you. I’ve asked you a number of big and meaty questions. So let’s go with something potentially a little bit lighter, which is what are some of your favorite works of historical fiction that you think both adult and teen readers will want on their to-be-read lists?

MZ: What’s going to happen is I’m going to walk away and go, why didn’t I think of that book or that book? The beginning and the end for me is The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, of course. It’s such a heartfelt rendering of everyday life and just so personal. Then, when you realize at the end what’s happened, you realize, oh, that was one little huge life.

That’s the perfect recommendation. Thank you so much for joining me on this interview.