Gudrun Pausewang was born in 1928 as the oldest of six children in Wichstadtl (Eastern Bohemia). Her father died in Russia in 1943, and after the war, her mother had to flee to the West alone with the six children. Gudrun Pausewang worked as a teacher at various schools in Germany as well as in Central and South America, teaching in Chile, Venezuela, and Colombia. In 1972, two years after the birth of her son, she permanently returned to Germany, where she taught at a primary school in Hesse until 1989. After retiring, she completed her studies in German literature and earned her doctorate in 1998 at Goethe University Frankfurt/Main. Gudrun Pausewang has been a writer since 1958. In addition to novels for adults, she has published numerous children's and youth books that reflect her own experiences and her concern about poverty in South America, the fate of refugees, and the threat of nuclear war. She advocates for peace, the environment, and social justice in her books. An important theme is also the confrontation with National Socialism and the Third Reich. For her literary work, she has received several awards, including the German Youth Literature Prize in 1988 for "Die Wolke." In 1999, she was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, and in 2009, she received the Grand Prize of the German Academy for Children’s and Youth Literature in Volkach for her lifetime achievement.