Katja Petrowskaja

Katja Petrowskaja (born 3 February 1970) is a Kiev born German prose writer and journalist. She grew up as Kateryna in Kiev and, after the Chernobyl disaster, in Moscow as the younger daughter of professor of literature Miron Petrovsky and the teacher Svetlana. Her brother is the historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern. 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.