Bio
Holly-Jane Rahlens grew up in New York and studied literature and theater at Queens College of the City University of New York before moving to Berlin, Germany. What began as work in radio and television—first as a radio host and broadcasting journalist, later as a documentary filmmaker—evolved into something more personal. She performed her own semi-autobiographical one-woman shows and later appeared in various films, including a TV adaptation of her stage monologue One Fine Day, or How I Learned to Walk Straight (GRIPS-Theater, 1990).
Rahlens’ debut novel, Becky Bernstein Goes Berlin (Piper, 1996), introduced her to a wide German audience as a “homegrown Berliner born in Brooklyn” (FAZ). Her first YA novel, Prince William, Maximilian Minsky and Me (Rowohlt, 2002; Candlewick Press, 2005), won the German Youth Literature Prize in 2003 and was adapted into a film in 2007—with a screenplay by Rahlens herself. The film was shown internationally and received several awards, including a Lola nomination for Best Children’s Film, the FBW seal of quality “besonders wertvoll” and a nomination for the “Kindertiger” screenwriting prize.
Since then, Rahlens has published twelve novels that have been translated into thirteen languages. Her 2022 collection, Future Fairy Tales—ten Grimm tales reimagined into a distant future setting and written in varied styles—was nominated for the German Youth Literature Prize in 2023. Her latest work, the historical novel Frostblooms, set during Berlin’s harsh winter of 1946/47, appears on the “Democracy” recommendation list from the German Academy for Children’s and Young Adult Literature and will be published in October 2026.
Profile in FAZ in German