Matthias Nawrat was born in Opole/Poland in 1979. At the age of ten, he moved with his parents to Bamberg. He studied biology in Heidelberg and Freiburg im Breisgau, then literary writing at the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel. He worked as a freelance science journalist. He has lived as a freelance writer in Berlin since 2012. He has published short stories, essays, excerpts from his diary and the novels "Wir zwei allein" (2012), "Unternehmer" (2014) "Die vielen Tode unseres Opas Jurek" (2015), "Der traurige Gast" (2019) and "Reise nach Maine" (2021). He has received numerous prizes for his books, most recently the European Union Prize for Literature 2020.