I was born in 1965 in Cologne and currently live in Berlin (Kreuzberg). There were several stops in between: Goch/Lower Rhine, where I attended an all-boys Catholic boarding school; La Calamine (Belgium) and Hamburg, where I tried to recover from the boarding school experience; Bonn, where I studied syntax and philosophy of language; Berkeley (California), where I earned a PhD in linguistics; Columbus (Ohio), where I taught German literature and linguistics for 17 years. I write fiction and nonfiction and translate literature from English and Dutch to German. I teach Creative Writing, Urban Studies, Hypermodernism, and related topics at the Free University in Berlin. 

My essays have appeared in Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung, die ZEIT, Süddeutsche Zeitung und The New Yorker, among others. My book Nicotine was translated into French, English and Spanish. The City and the World (2021), my second work of creative nonfiction, will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (London), translated by Jen Calleja.