Mikael Ross

Mikael Ross was born in Munich in 1984 and initially trained as a theatre tailor at the Bavarian State Opera. His move to Berlin and his studies at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee influenced his first longer story, Herrengedeck, which he self-published in 2008. During a year abroad at the Brussels School of Fine Arts, ESA Saint-Luc in Brussels, he met the Belgian scenarist and illustrator Nicolas Wouters. They share a fascination for punk and subculture. Together they wrote and drew the graphic novel Les pieds dans le béton (2013), about two restless young men in the Berlin squatter scene of the 1980s. After two years of research in Neuerkerode, the illustrator ventured a change of perspective with his graphic novel Der Umfall (2018) and tells of the low blows and highs of a young man with a mental disability. In 2020, he received the Max & Moritz Prize for the ‘Best German-language Comic’ for his work. In summer 2024, Der verkehrte Himmel, a heated thriller about a Vietnamese brother and sister who come across a kidnapped girl, is published.