Juli Zeh

Juli Zeh has sat as an honorary judge on the constitutional court of Brandenburg since January 2019, a post that fits a career built on law as much as on fiction. Born in Bonn in 1974, she read law at Passau and Leipzig, took her second state examination in 2003, and completed a doctorate in international law at Saarland. She also trained at the German Institute for Literature in Leipzig. Her debut, Adler und Engel, appeared in 2001 and won the Deutscher Bücherpreis as the best debut the following year. The Method started as a stage play commissioned by the Ruhrtriennale and first performed in Essen in 2007. Zeh reworked it into the 2009 novel Corpus Delicti: Ein Prozess, and Sally-Ann Spencer's English version was issued by Harvill Secker in 2012. It imagines a future Germany where the state governs each citizen's health by law, and puts a young woman, Mia Holl, on trial. Unterleuten followed in 2016 and Über Menschen in 2021.