was born in 1971 in Solingen but it was only in 1989 that I actually moved to Germany. Due to my father’s work for the German Foreign Office we moved about every four years, therefore my brother an I grew up in the USSR (Moscow), in South Africa (Cape Town), Switzerland (Geneva), Nigeria (Lagos) and in Portugal (Oporto). This, of course, has affected my interest in languages and cultures. After my final exams I moved to Hamburg, where I had the chance to start a graphic design apprenticeship. I never lost my wanderlust though, and apart from a half-year stay in California I made some travels to Australia and of course all across Europe.

y now I’m married for over fifteen years and I live with my wife, my son and my daughter as well as the two cats and the dog, the geckos, the lizards, the bunnies and the mice (animal account subject to change) amidst meadows and forests out on the country near Hamburg.

hen I was younger I had many diverse interests: marine biology, geology, paleontology, archaeology, history, drawing and writing. I also read a lot. There was a time when all I read was "high fantasy", I read all of Tolkien at the age of 13, later I was burning for Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, then Michael Crichton, Neal Stephenson and Tad Williams. Many of these may not exactly be known for their literary quality, but they did teach me a lot about how thrilling stories can be told. Highest ranking in my preferences up to date is still Umberto Eco with his novel “Foucault’s Pendulum” but also with his highly intelligent discourses on literature, language, ethics, belief and religion.

probably shouldn’t admit it, but I was never interested in anything we had to read at school. And my ideas to become a famous explorer in the Amazon or the deep sea where assessed by my teacher (who was also the principal of the school and who knew me quite well) as of little if none feasibility. I was too impatient and to imprecise to become a scientist, he told me, I should rather go for something humanistic, such as writing. In fact, I was indeed already writing at that time: I wrote for our pupil magazine and I had started with a novel at the age of 16.

was about 25 when I happened to learn from an editor who looked for a writer who could offer her a story for teenage girls with a love-story-by-chatting-on-the-internet plot. So I wrote a synopsis – and got into business. I was offered to write another book for the same publisher two years later (this one was a teenage specialized book on how the internet works) and received yet another offer some years later from a different publisher who was looking for an author for a children’s illustrated book on the same topics. This is how my first three publications came to be – all by chance.

n the meantime, I was working on my first "real" novel. I collected ideas, made notes, I did research and started the plotting. In 2001 I began to actually write first scenes. Finally, I could live out my interests for ancient cultures, modern developments, history and myths as well as my addition to writing. Even before my book was finished I already found a wonderful literary agent, Joachim Jessen of Agentur Schlück and soon after, I signed a contract with Limes, a German publisher of the Random House Publishing Group over my first two novels, the first of which came out in February 2006, the follow-up title one year after that. And this is how it all started ...