Felicitas Hoppe was born in 1960 in the German city of Hameln, and studied Russian and Italian languages, theology and literary criticism at the university. The writer’s debut was a collection of phantasmagoric stories, “Hairdressers’ Picnic,” published in 1996. Hoppe is the author of five novels, numerous essays and short stories, and the winner of many literary awards. Since 2007, she has been a member of the German Academy of Language and Literature. At the end of 2012, she was awarded the prestigious Georg Büchner Prize; in different years, Ingeborg Bachmann, Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, Peter Handke, Friedrich Dürrenmatt and other famous German-language writers became its laureates.