Jörg Bernig was born in Wurzen in East Germany in 1964. After an apprenticeship as a miner he studied English and German at the University of Leipzig and thereafter completed his PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has spent time in the United Kingdom where he was employed as a teaching assistant at a school in Dunfermline and then as Lektor and Research Assistant at the University of Swansea. His first literary publications appeared in the late 1990s. Besides his writing career he has been engaged in teaching and research at the TU Dresden. He is a member of the Sudetendeutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften und Künste, the P.E.N.-Zentrum Deutschland, the Sächsische Akademie der Künste and the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste and he has received a number of literary awards. (2013)