Isabel Fargo Cole

Isabel Fargo Cole grew up in New York City, received a BA from the University of Chicago in 1995, and has lived in Berlin ever since as a writer and translator of authors such as Wolfgang Hilbig, Franz Fühmann and Adalbert Stifter. Her translation of Hilbig’s Old Rendering Plant received the Kurt & Helen Wolff Prize in 2018. Since 2005 she has published short fiction and essays in German. Her debut novel Die grüne Grenze (Edition Nautilus, 2017), was nominated for the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair; her second novel, Das Gift der Biene, was published by Edition Nautilus in 2019 and selected for the 2019 LiteraTour Nord. In 2022, Die Goldküste. Eine Irrfahrt appeared in the “Naturkunden” nature writing series at Matthes und Seitz. In 2023, she received the Literaturpreis der A & A Kulturstiftung for her prose oeuvre.

From 2006-2016, she co-edited no man’s land, an online magazine for new German literature in English. Currently she organizes the initiative www.waldschaffen.de, which involves Berlin artists and writers in forestry projects, as well as the project “Self-Determined Tech for Language Professionals”.