I grew up in the Munich area, a Bavarian born and bred.
Although I come from a family with some of its roots in France, I only learned French and also English in school. I’ve always had a fascination with the study of reading and writing, with texts, languages and cultures. In my earliest years, I devoted myself to writing small poems and stories, and to reading about ten books per week (I especially loved Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear stories and everything by Astrid Lindgren). Later, feeling the urge to learn more languages, I took on Russian and went on school exchanges with a Russian high school.
Searching for ways to make writing my profession, I started working as a freelance journalist for a Munich newspaper when I was fifteen.
After I got my high school diploma, I went for an undergraduate degree in European Studies: Language, Literature and Culture at the University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt. This being a highly interdisciplinary program, I engaged with topics as diverse as Anglophone literatures, linguistics of the Romantic languages, intercultural communication, and the cultural history of Europe and the Western world. I enjoyed every minute of it.
In 2009, I once again caught the travel bug and went abroad to Laramie, Wyoming for a year. Snowed in high up in the Rockies, I studied Political Science and Creative Writing. And alongside my classwork I tried myself as a journalist for a set of different newspapers, magazines and the Wyoming Public Radio, a branch of the National Public Radio (NPR).
This was a new level of gaining intercultural experiences, and I got seriously hooked – so I decided to participate in an Erasmus Mundus Masters program in 2010. This program gave me the opportunity of studying Comparative Literature, philosophy and Cultural Studies in France, England and Spain.
After receiving my M.A., I moved back to the USA. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I participated in a PhD program, studying, doing research and teaching literature classes. My area: Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies. My “pet issue”: Human-Animal-Relationships in all their shapes, colors and cultures.
Today I live once more in the Munich area, where I work on many different and diverse projects. I translate novels and children’s books. Also, I write texts for websites and social media accounts. Additionally, I teach English, French and Spanish to adults and kids. And my doctoral dissertation on the topic of Child-Animal-Relationships in early 20th-century literatures is growing steadily.