Michi Strausfeld

Born in Recklinghausen, she studied English, French and Spanish in Cologne (M.A. 1969) and earned her PhD in Bonn in 1975, focusing on Contemporary Latin American literature with a dissertation on One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. Since 1968, she has lived in Barcelona, Bogotá, Madrid, Paris, and since 2003, in both Berlin and Barcelona. From 1974 to 2008, she was responsible for Latin American, Spanish, and Portuguese literature at Suhrkamp/Insel Verlag, overseeing ca. 350 publications. She coordinated international literary events such as the literary part of Horizonte ’82 and directed acclaimed children’s and youth book series at Alfaguara and Siruela in Spain. She served as a juror for the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (1981–2003), has been an advisor to the International Literature Festival Berlin (2001-2023) and worked as a literary scout for S. Fischer Verlag (2008–2015).

For her contributions to the promotion of Ibero-American literature, she received numerous honors, including the “Order of Isabella the Catholic” (2009), the Medal of the Ibero-American Institute Berlin (2009), the “Grand Cross of Alfonso X the Wise” (2015), and was named one of the 50 most important cultural figures in Latin America in 2012.

Her publications include Yellow Butterflies and the Gentlemen Dictators (2019), A New World of Flavours (2022), and The Emperess of the Galapagos. German Adventures in Latin America (2025)