Eugen Ruge was born in 1954 in the Urals, but has lived in Germany since he was two years old. He studied mathematics at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and soon became a fellow at the Central Institute for Geophysics in Potsdam. Since 1988, when he moved from the German Democratic Republic to the Federal Republic of Germany, he has worked exclusively for the theater, as a director and playwright, and translates from Russian. For his dramatic texts, Ruge received the Schiller Prize for Young Talents of the state of Baden-Württemberg; his first prose manuscript In the Times of Dying Light , a story about his own life and the life of his family, received the prestigious Alfred Döblin Prize (2009), and the novel based on this manuscript was awarded the Aspekte literary prize, and finally the Prize for Best Book in the German Language (2011).