Iris Hanika (b.1962) was born in Würzburg and grew up in Bad Königshofen. In Berlin, where she’s been living since 1979, she studied Universal and Comparative Literature. She wrote her first book in the summer of 1989. Since 1998, she has been reviewing political books for the national newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She was one of the first freelancers to work on the Berlin Pages, a daily supplement for the German capital in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. From 2000 to 2008, Hanika wrote a chronicle for the magazine Merkur. In 2006, she was awarded the Hans Fallada literary prize for all of her work, and in 2011, she was awarded the prize of the LiteraTour Nord and European Union Award for Literature for her novel "Das Eigentliche."