Photo by Joseph Reid/ Millennium Images, UK “For Heaven’s sake,” Virginia Woolf wrote, in an essay called “Letter to a Young Poet”, “publish nothing before you are 30.” This is such good advice that it should be tattooed inside the eyelids of every creative writing student on Earth. If widely followed, Woolf’s advice would, among other things, improve the mean quality of first novels. But of course Woolf’s advice will never be widely followed. There are always eager prodigies, unable to wait for public confirmation of their gifts, and there is always the hype machine, keen to find an angle: a match made in marketing hell. Nelio Biedermann, a Swiss writer of Hungarian descent, is an eager prodigy. He began work on his first novel, Lázár , when he was 16. (He is now 23.) He was an undergraduate at the University of Zurich when it was published in Germany last year, and it sold more than 200,000 copies.…