Isabel Cole grew up in New York City and studied at the University of Chicago; since 1995 she has lived in Berlin as a writer and translator. In 2006 she co-founded www.no-mans-land.org, the online journal of new German literature in translation. In 2013 she received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Award to translate Franz Fühmann’s At the Burning Abyss, and in 2014 her translation of Fühmann’s The Jew Car was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.