Helga Schubert was born in 1941 and grew up in East Berlin. She studied psychology and worked as a psychologist and psychotherapist in the GDR while also writing poetry, plays and books, including Judasfrauen, a study of women who denounced their husbands, friends and relatives during the Third Reich. In 2020, she was awarded the Ingeborg Bachman Prize for Vom Aufstehen (On Getting Up), her ‘life in stories’, which was published in 2021. She lives in North East Germany.