Olga Grjasnowa

Olga Grjasnowa (1984, Baku, Azerbaijan) immigrated to Germany with her family in 1996, where she learned German at the age of eleven and finished school there. In 2005, she began studying art history and Slavic studies in Göttingen, then switched to the German Literature Institute in Leipzig to study “Literary Writing”, which she completed in 2010. Olga Grjasnowa was a participant in the “Klagenfurt Literature Course” in 2007 and was awarded a scholarship by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation a year later. In 2010, she attended the Jürgen Ponto Writing Workshop, and received the “Wiener Wortstätten” playwriting prize. Her first novel “Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt” (The Russian is one who loves birch trees) immediately caused a sensation. Her novel “Die juristische Unschärfe einer Ehe” (The Legal Vagueness of a Marriage) was also a success and won her the Berlin Senate Scholarship for Literature. In 2020, her work of 2017 “Gott ist nicht schüchtern” premiered at the Berlin Theater and she published her novel “Der Verlorene Sohn” in the same year. Since March 2023, she has been a professor at the Institute for Language Arts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.