Jan Volker Röhnert was born in Gera in 1976, studied literature, German as a foreign language, Romance studies and education, worked for the Goethe Institute in Genoa and as a foreign language assistant in Toulon, taught literature at the FSU Jena and worked as a DAAD Lektor at Sofia University. Since 2011 he has been Heyne Junior Professor of Modern German Literature at the TU Braunschweig. He was appointed Heyne Junior Professor of Modern German Literature at the Institute of German Studies at TU Braunschweig in the winter semester of 2011. Among the awards he has received are the Prize of the Young Literature Forum Hesse-Thuringia 2002, the Poetry Debut Prize of the Literary Colloquium Berlin 2003, the Walter Dexel Scholarship of the City of Jena 2003, the Scholarship of the Stiftung Kulturfonds 2004, the Scholarship and Project Support of the Cultural Foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany.rderung of the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Thuringia in 2005 and 2006, the scholarship of the European Translators' College in Straelen in 2006, the Harald Gerlach Literary Scholarship in 2010 and the Wolfgang Weyrauch Prize at the Darmstadt Literary March in 2011.