Katja Lange-Müller was born in 1951 in East Berlin, where she was expelled from one school for her ‘un-socialistic behaviour’. She worked for four years at the East-Berlin newspaper Berliner Zeitung, followed by six years of care-work in women’s psychiatric wards in Berlin, before she went to Leipzig to study literature at the Johannes R. Becher Institute. There followed séjours in Mongolia where she studied and also worked at the Wilhelm-Pieck carpet factory in Ulan-Bator. In 1984 she crossed to West Berlin and Berlin remains her home today. She has won some of the major German literary prizes including the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, the Alfred Döblin Prize and the Kasseler Literature Prize (awarded for grotesque humour).

Photo: © Jürgen Bauer

• 1986 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize
• 1989/90 Writer in residence, Bergen-Enkheim
• 1991 New York Fellowship of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, Darmstadt
• 1991/92 Fellowship of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, Darmstadt
• 1995 Alfred Döblin Prize
• 1996 Berlin Literature Prize
• 1997/98 Writer in residence, Minden
• 2001 Writer in residence, Rheinsberg
• 2001 “SWR-Bestenliste” Prize
• 2002 Writer in Residence Literature Prize, Mainz
• 2002 Roswitha Prize
• 2005 Kassel Literature Prize for Grotesque Humor
• 2007 Finalist for the German Book Prize with Angry Sheep
• 2008 "LiteraTour Nord" Award
• 2008 Gerty Spies-Literary Award of the National Center for Civic Education of Rhineland-Palatinate
• 2008 Wilhelm Raabe Award for Literature