Natascha Wodin

Natascha Wodin is a German writer of Ukrainian origin. She was born in Fürth, Bavaria in 1945 to parents who had been forced labourers under the Nazi regime. She grew up in a camp for displaced persons. Following her mother's suicide, she was raised in a Catholic home for girls. She worked as a telephone operator and stenographer before becoming an interpreter and translator of Russian in the early 1970s.

Wodin has translated literary works from Russian into German and has lived in Moscow. She has written novels, short stories and poetry, and has won many prizes, including the Adelbert-von-Chamisso Prize in 1998, the Brüder-Grimm Prize in 1989 and 2009, the Alfred Döblin Prize in 2015 and the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2017 for Sie kam aus Mariupol, one of her best known books. Her recent book Irgendwo in diesem Dunkel is a memoir of her father.

She was married to the novelist Wolfgang Hilbig, an experience which she recounts in her book Nachtgeschwister. She has lived in Berlin and Mecklenburg since 1984.