Peter Wawerzinek was born in Rostock in 1954. He grew up in various children’s and foster homes.
Since 1988, he has worked as a director and singer, and has also written books and radio plays. He is a winner of the Berlin Critics’ Literature Prize, the Radio Play Prize of the Berlin Academy of Arts, both the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and the Ingeborg Bachmann Readers’ Prize, the Shortlist German Book Prize, and the German Schiller Foundation Award.