Pieke Biermann

She has lived in Berlin since 1976 and works as a freelance translator of English, American and Italian literature into German.

Biermann was honoured with the 2020 Leipzig Book Fair Prize for his translation of Oreo, the only novel by African-American writer Fran Ross to take its particular tone from Yiddish.

The literary critic Antje Rávik Strubel praised it as a "magnificent achievement" by the translator, "that the countless language games, onomatopoeias and richness of word invention are transferred into German and that the linguistic pleasure and great humour of the text are conveyed".

[4] Together with Gisela Bock and Barbara Duden, among others, she founded the "Lohn für Hausarbeit" group at the Frauenzentrum Westberlin, which was based on an international feminist movement that emerged in the US in the early 1970s.

The group argued that not only housework, but also prostitution was wage labour like any other and that sex work was a way for women in patriarchy to achieve independence.

What Los Angeles was for Raymond Chandler or Amsterdam for Janwillem van de Wetering, Berlin is for me – the unknown metropolis of the Western world: a city that seems to be made up of myths.

The last novel in the series, Four, Five, Six (the title alludes to Billy Wilder's 1961 comedy One, Two, Three), deals with the "Berlin plagued by unification problems".

[10] Florian Felix Weyh read the language of her crime short stories Berlin, Kabbala, which appeared in the same year, differently.