Kathrin Schmidt was born in Gotha in 1958 and lives in Berlin. She worked as a child psychologist until reunification. From 1989/90 she was a representative of the United Left in the East Berlin Round Table, editor of the women’s magazine YPSILON and worked at the Berlin Institute for Comparative Social Research and Janus e.V. She has been a freelance writer since 1994. Her novel “Du stirbst nicht” (Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2009), for which she won the German Book Prize in 2009, is based on her experience of having to relearn speech and writing after a stroke.