About the Author
Stefanie Zweig was born in Upper Silesia in 1932 and fled with her Jewish family to East Africa in 1938 to escape persecution by the National Socialists. She spent her childhood on a farm in the Kenyan highlands and returned to Germany with her family after the war. She was never able to forget Africa and returned to the country of her love whenever she could. After training as a journalist, Stefanie Zweig headed the feature section of a Frankfurt daily newspaper for thirty years. She received numerous awards for her children's books. Her novels were on the bestseller lists for weeks and reached a total circulation of over 7.5 million copies, translated into fifteen languages. "Nowhere in Africa" was adapted for the cinema, won both the Bavarian and German Film Awards in 2002, and received an "Oscar" for Best Foreign Language Film in 2003. Stefanie Zweig passed away on April 25, 2014.