Gudrun Pausewang is the literary pseudonym behind which the German writer Gudrun Wilcke hides. Born in 1928 in a remote enclave of Eastern Bohemia, in the Sudetenland, she was the eldest of the five daughters of a humble family. Her father, a farmer who took his entire family to live an alternative life in the countryside, died in World War II, when Gudrun Pausewang was just fifteen years old. Pausewang studied at a women's gymnasium and, at the end of the war, moved with his family to the German Federal Republic, where he obtained the Abitur, which would allow him to enter university. She studied Pedagogy in Weilburg and worked as a primary and secondary teacher, a profession that she has practiced throughout her life, until her retirement. Starting in 1956, he began teaching at German schools in Chile, where he spent five years, and in Venezuela, where he spent another two and a half years. In 1963 she returned to Germany and studied Germanic Languages, and four years later she returned to Colombia with her husband Hermann Wilcke, where she taught for five more years at the German School in Barranquilla. She returned to Germany in 1972 with her two-year-old son, and retired as a teacher in 1989. Her first works were intended for an adult audience, but she would soon begin to cultivate children's and youth literature with equal success. In his work, which consists of eighty-six novels, themes related to the Third World and the protection of the environment, peace and social justice stand out. He has received several national awards for his novel The Cloud (1987), in which, against the backdrop of the Chernobyl tragedy, Gudrun Pausewang describes the extent of a nuclear catastrophe in Germany. In 1988 he received the German Prize for Youth Literature for this work. In 1999 she was awarded the German Medal of Merit, and in 2017 she was awarded the Special Prize of the German Youth Literature Prize for her life's work.