Tankred Dorst, German author and playwright
Tankred Dorst (19 December 1925 – 1 June 2017) was a German playwright and storyteller.Dorst lived and worked in Munich. His farces, parables, one-act-plays and adaptations were inspired by the theatre of the absurd and the works of Ionesco, Giraudoux and Beckett. His monumental drama Merlin oder das wüste Land, which was premiered in 1981 in Düsseldorf, has been compared to Goethe's Faust. Some critics see it as the first major drama of the 1980s. In his tribute to Tankred Dorst on the occasion of the conferment of the Georg Büchner Prize in 1990, Georg Hensel remarked that Dorst's plays all have a direct connection to the present: "For 30 years Dorst's plays have responded to the great transformations. He has always been a companion to the times."

Dorst first directed the Ring of the Nibelung in Bayreuth in 2006.