Ilija Trojanow, born in Sofia in 1965, grew up in Nairobi and studied law and ethnology in Munich. In 1989 he founded the Marino publishing house for books about Africa. He is an author, translator and journalist. From 1998 to 2003 he lived in Bombay, and from 2003 to 2006 in Cape Town. He has been at home in Vienna since 2008. His publications include: Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall (The World is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner, 1996), Hundezeiten (Dog Times: Homecoming to a Foreign Country, 1999/2006), An den inneren Ufern Indiens (Along the Ganges, 2003), Zu den heiligen Quellen des Islam (Mumbai to Mecca, 2004), Der Weltensammler (The Collector of Worlds, 2006), Nomade auf vier Kontinenten (Nomad on four continents, 2007), EisTau (The Lamentations of Zeno, 2011), Der überflüssige Mensch (The Superfluous Human Being, 2013), Wo Orpheus begraben liegt (Where Orpheus Lies Buried, 2013), Macht und Widerstand (Power and Resistance, 2015), Meine Olympiade (My Olympiad: One Amateur, Four Years, 80 Disciplines, 2016), Nach der Flucht (After the escape, 2017), and Hilfe? Hilfe! (Help? Help!, with Thomas Gebauer, 2018). He has won numerous Awards and Prizes including the Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2006, the Berlin Literature Prize 2007, the Carl America Literature Prize 2011, the Heinrich Böll Prize 2017, the Usedom Literature Prize 2018, the Honorary Prize of the Austrian Book Trade for Tolerance in Thought and Action 2018, and the Vilenica International Literary Award 2018.