Katja Petrowskaja is a Kiev born German prose writer and journalist. She studied literature and Slavic studies at the University of Tartu, where she was particularly influenced by the semiotician Yuri Lotman. In 1994–1995 she studied with a scholarship offered by the American Council of Teachers of Russian (ACTR) at Stanford University and Columbia University. In 1998 she defended her dissertation The poetical prose of Vladislav Khodasevich at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. In 1999 she moved to Germany where she lives with her husband and two daughters in Berlin.
her debut bokk "Maybe Esther", published in 2014, tells the story of the genocide of the Jewish population of Kiev, culminating in the massacre of Babi Yar on 29–30 September, through the account by Esther, who resembles her great-grandmother Esther, killed during the massacre. The book has been translated into more than 20 languages.
