Helene Hegemann

Helene Hegemann, born in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1992, is a novelist, screenwriter, and director based in Berlin. She began writing screenplays at the age of 14, and her debut film, Torpedo (2008), was awarded the Max Ophüls Prize and hailed as a discovery of the year. In 2010, she published her first novel, Axolotl Roadkill, which was translated into twenty languages and sparked a wide-ranging debate on plagiarism and intertextuality. Hegemann adapted the novel for the screen herself in 2017 under the title Axolotl Overkill, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and received critical acclaim. Subsequent works include the novels Jage zwei Tiger (2013) and Bungalow (2018), the latter of which was longlisted for the German Book Prize. In addition to her literary output, Hegemann directs for theater and opera and contributes essays and columns to leading publications.

During her residency at Villa Aurora, Hegemann is developing a screenplay centered on the case of Mary Flora Bell, the eleven-year-old English girl who, in the late 1960s, killed two young children in Newcastle upon Tyne and remains one of Britain’s youngest convicted killers.