Katja Petrowskaja was born in Kiev in 1970, studied literature in Tartu (Estonia) and received her doctor´s degree in Moscow. She has been living in Berlin since 1999 and works as a journalist for several Russian and German media. In 2013 she received the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for her book Vielleicht Esther (Maybe Esther, to be published in English in 2018).