Michael Lederer (born July 9, 1956 in Princeton, New Jersey) is an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist currently living in Berlin, Germany.

At age 12, Lederer joined the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) to work as a child actor in San Francisco.

In the mid-seventies, Lederer lived in a tipi on a hippie commune called The Land in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California.

In a 2014 interview, Lederer told Deutsche Welle television [9] "I was drunk and stoned one night, climbing up the balconies to our apartment, and I fell from the fourth story down to the parking lot."

While recovering with a broken leg in Granada's Hospital Clinico de San Cecilio, he began work on a novella.

"[10][11] In 2001, the Catalan writer David Marti,[12] reviewing the book in the French literary journal "Remanences," [13] wrote "No one as yet has been able, like Michael Lederer, to engender the calmness of our life and dreams on the shores of the frail yet powerful Mediterranean Sea."

In March 2013, a revised edition of "Nothing Lasts Forever Anymore" was published in both English and German by PalmArt Press in Berlin[14] and presented at the Leipzig Book Fair.

The museum chronicles the voyage of the only group of Jewish refugees admitted into the United States from Europe during World War II.

"[25] Oswego's Palladium Times newspaper, writing about the play, noted the reading at English Theatre Berlin would include a filmed discussion with Lederer.

"As they were not immigrants and had no legal status, the refugees including my dad were forced to wear cardboard tags on strings around their necks identifying them as 'U.S.

"[27] In an essay "America and the Holocaust" published November 2022 in the American Studies Journal Blog, American-born Lederer writes of how difficult it is for his own also his children's generations "growing and living in relative safety" to grasp what it is like to suffer the horrors of war, and prejudice.

[29][30][31] Aimed to promote Dubrovnik at home and abroad, DSF's first touring production was Lederer's own play "Mundo Overloadus".

In "Beating the Global Odds", Paul A. Laudicina summarizes and cites Lederer's play, saying "Imagine having at last the entire knowledge of human civilization at your fingertips, and finding that it basically gives you a migraine.

Michael Lederer, an American writer who lives in Berlin and Dubrovnik, Croatia, calls this Mundo Overloadus – the title of his recent play that premiered in New York.

In a March 2024 interview with the magazine Kulturring Berlin, Lederer described in detail political struggles that befell the Festival as it eventually led a campaign against mass tourism.

Reviewing it, the newspaper Berliner Morgenpost called The Great Game "Wonderfully ironic…a brilliant chronicle of loss, showing us characters who have fallen through the cracks of our increasingly interconnected world.

The Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin commented that "In the stories of Michael Lederer, it is as if the author deliberately and thoroughly erected a fine building, and then a ruthless movement destroyed it in front of you.

Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Picasso, Andre Breton and other great artists once lived in Cadaqués.

The magazine InKultura[45] wrote, "With literary ferocity, Lederer tells the story of a summer that begins in exceedingly good spirits but ends with a long fall.

Cadaqués is a wonderful novel that masterfully upholds a balance between melancholy and joy, with deep empathy for the artistic endeavors but also individual failures of its characters."

In January 2015, Lederer published an article in the American Studies Journal blog[46] announcing his new novel-in-progress, "Saving America".

Lederer was invited by Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg to read from the manuscript at the Muhlenberg Center in November 2017.

[48] Lederer revealed in Leipzig that "For the last ten months, I have been developing a screenplay based on this story as it has evolved.

When asked about the title of the new book in an interview on National Public Radio (NPR),[50] Lederer explained that there are two photos of himself on the cover, one as a three-year-old, another as a 59-year-old.