Michelle Steinbeck
SwitzerlandAbout
Michelle Steinbeck is a Swiss writer born in 1990 and raised in Zurich. She writes novels, poetry, plays, essays, and journalistic pieces, combining surreal imagery, dark humour, and unconventional storytelling to explore identity, power, and the human experience. Her debut novel, My Father Was a Man on Land and a Whale in the Water, attracted international attention and was nominated for both the Swiss Book Prize and the German Book Prize in 2016. Her poetry collection Eingesperrte Vögel singen mehr followed in 2018. Her writing has been translated into several languages, and she has appeared at literary events across three continents. Steinbeck is a columnist for the Swiss weekly newspaper WOZ Die Wochenzeitung and co-founded RAUF, a feminist writers’ collective based in Zurich. She has studied philosophy and sociology and lives in Basel. Her second novel, Favorita, combines surrealism and feminist political critique to examine family history, patriarchal violence, and the stories inherited across generations of women.
