Angelika Mechtel (1943–2000)

Angelika Mechtel was born in Dresden, Germany, the daughter of Walter Mechtel, a journalist, and his wife Gisela Altendorf, an actress. She grew up in West Germany. She left her convent high school in 1962 before taking her final exams because she was pregnant and got married. She wrote prolifically in a wide variety of genres, including novels, poetry, short stories, children's books, radio plays, and scripts for television films. Her first volume of poems, Gegen Eis und Flut (Against Ice and Flood) was published in 1963, and she had her first major success with a collection of stories called Die feinen Totengräber (The Fine Gravediggers, 1970). In the 1970s, she started to volunteer for the Association of German Writers, and in the 1980s, she became vice-president and commissioner for the Writers-in-Prison Committee of International PEN. She helped win the release of persecuted writers from prisons in Turkey, the Soviet Union and Mexico. She had two daughters, and from 1981 lived with the writer Gerd E. Hoffmann.She died of breast cancer in 1993 at age 56.