Ilija Trojanow

Ilija Trojanow was born in Sofia in 1965. In 1971, he fled to Germany with his family, who moved on to Kenya the following year. He grew up partly in Nairobi and studied law and ethnology in Munich. In 1989 he founded the Kyrill & Method publishing house, followed in 1992 by Marino Verlag, which specialized in African literature. Trojanow is a writer, translator, and essayist. His works include the novels *The Collector of Worlds* (*Der Weltensammler*), *Macht und Widerstand*, and *Tausend und ein Morgen*, as well as travel writing and essays. His awards include the Leipzig Book Fair Prize (2006), the Berlin Literature Prize (2007), the Prize of the Literature Houses (2009), the Würth Prize for European Literature (2010), the Carl Amery Prize (2011), and the Heinrich Böll Prize (2017).