Julia Franck was born in East Berlin in 1970. While studying German Literature and American Studies she worked, as a freelancer, for radio and various magazines and newspapers. In 1995 Julia Franck won first prize in the ‘open mike’ literature competition.  Since then she has received many awards, among them the German Book Prize in 2007 for her novel Die Mittagsfrau (The Blind Side of the Heart) which was translated into 34 languages.  In 2010 The Blind Side of the Heart was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize as well as the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize and is on the longlist for the 2011 IMPAC Prize.  In 2009, Julia Franck edited the anthology Grenzübergange in which she invited other authors to write about their experience of the German Democratic Republic. She is currently living in Berlin