Katja Petrowskaja was born in 1970 in Kiev, Ukraine. He studied Letters in Estonia and obtained a doctorate in Moscow. Since 1999 he lives in Berlin and works as a journalist for the Russian and German press. Since 2011 he has been a columnist for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. In 2013 she won for Esther the Ingeborg Bachmann Award, one of the most prestigious in the German language. The novel is being translated and published in twenty languages.