“Sexuality Isn’t Just for the Young”: Author Ingrid Schampel in Conversation

Art doesn’t only happen on canvas, on stage, or at the piano. It also happens sentence by sentence. Ingrid Schampel writes the way you play piano: with a feel for tempo, pauses, and just the right note. She works with humor and a clear point of view, in a family where storytelling is a tradition. Her grandfather was a political pastor and prolific writer, her mother wrote a novel at twelve, and she herself wrote successful family novels. Born in Bad Godesberg, she worked as a doctor’s assistant, journalist, and local historian before returning to writing in 2024 after a long break.

In her recent books, she takes on a subject that literature and art keep circling, yet that is rarely told about old age: bodies, desire, and closeness. Her novel “Die zärtlichen Offenbarungen des Mathias Grey” (The Tender Revelations of Mathias Grey, available in German) came out on September 15, 2026.

You were born in Bad Godesberg and worked as a doctor’s assistant, journalist, and local historian. What led you to writing along all those paths?

Probably genes. My grandfather, the political pastor Heinrich Stuhrmann, wrote countless books. One of them was recently republished in a more modern look, with the text unchanged. My mother wrote her only novel at twelve, “Fee, das Waldkind” (Fee, the Forest Child). Such colorful ancestors led me to my two successful family novels, “Bonner Serenade” and “Berliner Intermezzo.”

After a long break, you made your comeback in 2024. What brought you back to the writing desk?

Corona caused all sorts of things. I refused the vaccine and was pretty isolated. The result was my first erotic novel, “Die schamlosen Offenbarungen der Mrs. Warren” (The Shameless Revelations of Mrs. Warren). And I’m still alive.

Readers already know Mathias Grey from “Die schamlosen Offenbarungen der Mrs. Warren.” When did you realize he deserved a book of his own?

Only after the success of Mrs. Warren did I realize it was time to take on male eroticism.

He thinks he’s the hunter and ends up as the prey everywhere. What drew you to that reversal?

Mathias is, like almost all men, a hunter. After marrying Mathilde, who wants her marital duties fulfilled from morning till night on beds, sofas, and rugs, he becomes the hunted. He’s apparently so used to it that he keeps being hunted. And let’s not forget: he’s a handsome man, and according to Nietzsche, beauty incites procreation.

Abigail Warren is 72, smart, and pours whisky the way others hand out advice. How much of you is in her?

Since I drink neither whisky nor any other alcohol, all I share with her is a knack for tracking down colorful characters. It probably comes from the ancestors I mentioned, who were full of originals. Where else would you find a pastor who lost an Art Nouveau duplex because he went broke?

The novel looks with humor at desire, vanity, and bodies that can’t keep up with everything anymore. What did you want to say about closeness in old age that rarely gets said?

Closeness matters at every age, not just in old age. Anyone who wasn’t lovingly held as a child has a hard time offering closeness later. I was held a lot and have felt at home in friendly arms all my life. Anyone who has no one left in old age to give them closeness is badly off. Often, though, it comes down to hygiene. People would rather hug someone who smells good than the opposite.

Is there a scene or a line in the book you’re especially attached to? (Please don’t give too much away.)

Marriage romances only exist in novels where the heroine dies in the first chapter.

You’ve been on “Kölner Treff,” on “Kaum zu glauben!,” and in many newspapers. What surprised you most about the reactions to your books?

“Surprised” isn’t the right word. I was overwhelmed to get so much attention at almost a hundred years old, plus over 3,600 likes and comments, just because I became a kind of taboo breaker. As if sexuality were something only the young have. Through readings and my aging family, I’ve spent a lot of time in nursing homes, and I’ve seen that in the evenings, people like to sneak down the hallways.

Who is this book for, and what should readers take away after the last chapter?

I’m a social person, and I want my readers to relax, but also to have something to think about, which has apparently been abolished without good reason. Anyone who still does it keeps their feelings and their inner world, if they have one, to themselves. They stew, get sick, and burden our health care system.

Please finish this sentence: “You can tell a good book by the fact that …”

… as a reader, you don’t have to guess what’s going on in the author’s head.

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