Julia Franck

Julia Franck (born 1970 in East Berlin) is a German novelist whose work belongs to the generation raised after the division of Germany. She writes in German about the country's twentieth-century history and about women's experience within it, and she reached a wide international readership with the German Book Prize she won in 2007.

In 1978 her family left East Germany for West Berlin, where they spent nine months in a refugee camp. Franck then grew up in Schleswig-Holstein. She studied German Literature and American Studies at the Free University of Berlin and spent time in the United States, Mexico and Guatemala. She worked as an editor for the broadcaster Sender Freies Berlin and contributed to newspapers and magazines.

Her output includes five novels and a short story collection, as well as an edited volume of essays. Several of her recent books, including the story collection Grenzübergänge, deal directly with German history of the last century. Lagerfeuer is set in the Marienfelde refugee camp in 1970s West Berlin, while Die Mittagsfrau (The Noon Witch) moves from the First World War to divided Germany in the 1950s. Franck has not called herself a feminist writer, but feminist critics have examined how her novels portray women's experience of history, power, sexuality and relationships such as motherhood.

Her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages, and her novel Lagerfeuer was adapted as the 2013 film West, directed by Christian Schwochow. Her awards include the Open Mike prize, the Marie Luise Kaschnitz Prize and, in 2007, the German Book Prize.