Milena Moser

Milena Moser (born Milena Pörtner on July 13, 1963) is a Swiss writer. Her first language (or dialect) is Swiss German. She has emigrated to the United States twice, in 1998 and again in 2015, but German remains the language in which she writes, and in which by 2018 more than twenty of her novels had been published.

Biography Milena Pörtner was born on July 13, 1963, in Zürich, Switzerland. Her father was the writer-playwright and dramaturge Paul Pörtner (1925-1984). Marlis Pörtner, her mother, is a psychologist who in her later years has also come to prominence as a successful author. And Milena Moser's brother, Stephan Pörtner, is an author too.

She says she knew when she was 8 that she wanted to become a writer. After that she took a writing job with the Swiss broadcasting organisation before heading for Paris where she lived for two years. By now aged 21, it was while living in Paris that she wrote her first (35 years later still unpublished) novels. (More recently she has been identified as one of Switzerland's most successful writers". She and / or her friends also created the "Krösus Verlag" (publishing business) so that she would be able to publish her books.

In 1998, accompanied by her two sons and her second husband, the photographer Thomas Kern, she relocated to San Francisco. The decision to move was a spontaneous one, reached the previous year during a holiday in the States. During the eight years she spent in California she wrote three songs for the singer Michael von der Heide. "Bad Hair Days", "The postman died" and "Capuccino" later found their way onto von der Heide's album "Tourist", which appeared in 2000 and reached position 5 in the Swiss hit parade. (That makes it Michael von der Heide's most popular album to date.)

Milena Moser returned to Switzerland in 2006. She now teamed up the (formerly East German) playwright-author Sibylle Berg and with her agent Anne Wieser to set up a "writing school". In a "writing workshop" in Aarau she started providing writing courses for the untutored, also offering her services as a "writing coach" in classes producing jointly authored pieces of work. While Moser concentrated on face-to-face teaching, her business partner Sibylle Berg placed her own focus on on-line tuition courses, available to German-language students unwilling or unable to make their way to Aarau. Das wahre Leben. Roman. Nagel & Kimche, München 2013. Das Glück sieht immer anders aus. Nagel & Kimche, München 2015. Gebrauchsanweisung für Zürich. Piper, München 2015, Hinter diesen blauen Bergen, Verlag Nagel & Kimche, 2017, Land der Söhne, Verlag Nagel & Kimche, Zürich 2018