Iris Wolff, born behind the iron curtain in the medieval town of Sibiu, Transylvania in 1977, is an award-winning writer whose work carries the reader deep into her former homeland. The fate of those who stay and those who choose to migrate is the constant and powerful theme weaving through her novels.

Blurred is her fourth novel and the first to be translated into English.

A best-seller in Germany, her work has been translated into many languages, has received wide acclaim and numerous literary awards. Among them is the 2023 Dresden Chamisso prize for a work of literature based on a migrant experience contributing to European interconnectedness and the 2025 Konrad Adenauer Foundation Literature Prize, honouring writers who give freedom a voice.

In 2025, she was also awarded the Spycher Prize and the Uwe-Johnson Prize for outstanding literary works, last awarded to Jenny Erpenbeck in 2022 for her novel, Kairos.

She lives in Freiburg im Breisgau.

Listen to Iris interviewed here in the Monocle Meet the Writers series and here talking about Blurred, her first novel to be translated into English.

In June 2026, Moth Books will publish Iris Wolff’s new novel, Clearing, which was shortlisted for the German Book Prize 2025, translated by Ruth Martin.