Karen Köhler

Karen Köhler (born in 1974 in Hamburg) is a German writer, playwright and actor.

Karen Köhler was born in the Barmbek district of Hamburg.

She is the daughter of a firefighter and a care home assistant.

After graduating from school, she studied acting at the Academy of Music and Theater in Bern.

In 2008, she began working as an author (drama and prose) and illustrator.

In 2010 she became a member of the Hamburg Authors Forum and in 2011 she received the Hamburg Literature Prize.

From 2013 to 2015, she wrote a series of plays (a hero trilogy) dealing with the topic of right-wing extremism for the DNT Weimar, which have since been performed in theatres throughout Germany.

She worked as an actor until 2014, first in permanent positions and then as a freelancer.

She was invited to give a reading at the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize ceremony in 2014 and received special attention as she was not allowed to attend the event because she had chickenpox.

Out of solidarity with her, there was a spontaneous, unofficial reading of Karen Köhler's text Il Comandante at Klagenfurt Lendhafen, which was broadcast on the Internet via livestream.

This text is part of her collection of stories Wir haben Raketen geangelt (We Fished for Rockets).

After its publication in the summer of 2014, it reached position 36 on the bestseller list for hardcover fiction, was nominated for the Aspects Literature Prize and was translated into several languages.

Subsequently, Köhler won various scholarships and artist residencies.

In 2019, Köhler was nominated for the German Screenplay Award, which was awarded at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival, for Cowboy & Indianer (Cowboys & Indians).

She has received several scholarships, including a one-year scholarship from the German Literature Fund for her debut novel Miroloi.

Miroloi was published in 2019 by Carl Hanser Verlag and was on the long list for the 2019 German Book Prize.

Karen Köhler lives in Hamburg.