Cécile Wajsbrot
(1954, Paris) writes novels, essays and audio plays. She translates from English (including Virginia Woolf) and German (including Marcel Beyer and Peter Kurzeck) and lives alternately in Paris and Berlin. After her studies, she worked as a French teacher and for radio, and has been a freelance writer since 1988. She has been a member of the German Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung since 2017 and of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin since 2019. Her novels often focus on the Shoah in Germany and the silencing of it. Her latest novel Zerstörung (2020) tells of the annihilation of cultural memory in the form of a futuristic novel. Some of the awards she has received include the Prix de la Fondation Bernheim (2020), the Prix de l’Academie de Berlin (2016) and the Eugen-Helmle-Übersetzerpreis (2014).