Michaela Wiebusch and Rita Erz became friends and colleagues through their therapeutical work. For years they have been learning and teaching about personality development and self development. Rita Erz is a European Business Coach working with the senior management of well-known companies. Michaela Wiebusch started out as an actress (Es ist zu deinem Besten, Beck is back, Soko Wismar) but also works in bodywork therapy and as a psychological counsellor. In the secret village of the butterflies is their first book together and it will be published in spring 2022 by dtv.

Max Annas lives in Berlin. By 2014, he had published around a dozen documentary books on cinema, food and other topics. Since then, he has written ten novels set in South Africa, East and West Germany, the German Empire, reunified Germany and in an imagined future Germany. He has received the German Crime Writing Prize for several of his novels.

Haneen Al-Sayegh, born in Mount Lebanon in 1986, studied English Literature at the American University of Beirut. She works as a lecturer and translator, has published three volumes of poetry and was awarded the prestigious Naji Noaman Literary Award. Her debut novel "Das unsichtbare Band" caused a sensation after its publication in Lebanon due to its breaking of taboos and was celebrated as a literary sensation in the Arab media. Haneen Al-Sayegh lives in Beirut and Berlin.

Igal Avidan was born in Tel Aviv in 1962. After studying English Literature and Computer Science in Israel, he moved to Germany to study Political Science in Berlin. Since 1990 he is a well known expert of the Middle East, working for German radio and newspapers. In 2017, his book Mod Helmy. Wie ein arabischer Arzt in Berlin Juden vor der Gestapo rettete (Mod Helmy. How an Arab doctor saved German Jews from the Gestapo in Berlin) was published. The demand for readings continues to this day. 

Janine Adomeit was born in Cologne in 1983. Sie studied literature and linguistics and has published regularly since 2008 (poetin, Bella triste, Sprache im technischen Zeitalter among others). She participated in the LCB’s authors class and the writing class of the Jürgen Ponto foundation and was also awarded the Leonhard-und-Ida Wolff-Gedächtnispreis by the city of Munich. She lives in Flensburg, where she works as copywriter and author .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Magda Albrecht was born in 1986 and grew up in Berlin. In 2013 she graduated in American studies and has since worked as a political spokeswoman and as a journalist. She regularly contributes to the blog “Mädchenmannschaft”, carries out research and give talks on body ideals and assumptions on health and fatness, which she questions. She sums up her activism in a short credo: My fat is political.