Katja Lange-Müller

Katja Lange-Müller, born in 1951 in Berlin-Lichtenberg, is a writer. At the age of 16, she was expelled from school for “anti-socialist behavior” and subsequently trained as a typesetter. She then worked as a photo editor for Berliner Zeitung and spent a year as a props assistant at East German television (DDR-Fernsehen). Lange-Müller also worked for several years as a nursing assistant in psychiatric wards at Berlin’s Charité Hospital and the Hospital for Neurology and Psychiatry in Berlin-Herzberge.

In 1979, she began studying at the “Johannes R. Becher” Institute for Literature in Leipzig. Her husband, Wolfgang Müller, had submitted her application without her knowledge. In 1982, she spent a year in Mongolia, working in the “Wilhelm Pieck” carpet factory in Ulaanbaatar. Upon returning to the GDR, she worked as an editor at Altberliner Verlag in 1983. In 1984, she moved to West Berlin.

Lange-Müller has been a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature since 2000 and of the Academy of Arts (Berlin) since 2002. In protest against the merger with the East German PEN Center, she left PEN Zentrum Deutschland in 2002. In 2022, she became a founding member of PEN Berlin.

In 2012/2013, she was a fellow at Villa Massimo, received the Kleist Prize, and was a fellow at the Tarabya Cultural Academy in Istanbul in 2013/2014. In the summer semester of 2016, she held the visiting lectureship in poetics at Goethe University Frankfurt.

For her literary work, which includes novels and short stories, she has received numerous awards, including the Günter Grass Prize in 2017. Her writing often satirically portrays social outsiders, frequently drawing on her own life experiences. Her latest novel, Unser Ole (2024), explores the dynamics of an unusual shared household and sheds light on social dependencies with psychological nuance.

In April 2022, she signed an open letter opposing arms deliveries to Ukraine but later distanced herself from it after a trip to Estonia. In 2024, she appeared in the documentary Die Unbeugsamen 2 by Torsten Körner.

She lives alternately in Berlin and Switzerland.