Katrin Askan

Katrin Askan is a German author. She was born in East Germany, but in 1986, three years before the changes that finally adumbrated an end to the one-party dictatorship, she managed to escape to the west. A (slightly) fictionalised version of the long build-up to the event and of the escape itself, with a powerful resonance of authenticity, constitutes the core of her 2000 novel "Aus dem Schneider".

Life and works Katrin Askan was born in East Berlin. After passing her Abitur (school leaving exams), which under most circumstances would have cleared the path to university-level education, she was enrolled on a traineeship in a hospital. In 1986 she succeeded in smuggling herself into West Berlin, apparently taking an indirect route that included, during the most critical stage in the exercise, three hours in the boot of a car from the west. She went on to study Germanistics and Philosophy at the Free University in the part of the city known before 1990 as West Berlin. Then, in 1998, Askan moved to Germany's western media capital, Cologne, where she supports herself as a freelance author and Swedish language translator. It was well reviewed by critics. It touched on a number of the same themes.

Recognition In 1998 Katrin Askan won the Friedrich Hölderlin Literary Award ("Förderpreis") from the municipality of Bad Homburg. In 1999 she was the recipient of the annual Rolf-Dieter Brinkmann Stipendium, funded and administered by her home city of Cologne.

Selected works