Melinda Nadj Abonji was born in 1968 in Becsej, Serbia, moving with her family to Switzerland in the early 1970s. Her debut novel Tauben fliegen auf won both the German and Swiss Book Prizes in 2010, and was published in English by Seagull Books as Fly Away, Pigeon (2014), translated by Tess Lewis.
Melinda Nadj Abonji’s second novel Schildkrötensoldat (Tortoise Soldier) was published by Suhrkamp in October 2017. Today, she lives in Zurich, where she works as a writer and musician. (2017)