Marius Schmidt was born in Braunschweig in 1983, grew up in the Hamburg suburbs and has lived in Berlin since 2002. He studied Fine Arts at the UDK Berlin. Since then, he has been writing and producing stories that combine images and texts to create new narrative formats. From 2006 to 2012, he was co-editor of the literature and art magazine ‘Pascal Richter’. He then published an illustrated book about paranoid trees and illustrated the adventures of an unemployed shrimp. As an artist, Marius Schmidt has been awarded various grants, including from the Stiftung Kunstfonds and the Berlin Senate. As an author, he received the Swiss literary prize ‘Textstreich’ in 2020 for his short story cycle ‘Zählen Sie bis Null’. In 2021 he received the Berlin Research Fellowship for Literature.

He is currently working on a comic about the immediate post-war period in the Bay of Lübeck. Two historical events in particular play a role here: the sinking of the ‘Cap Arcona’ with around 7,000 concentration camp prisoners in the last days of the war and the situation of the refugees in the holiday resorts after the end of the war. Due to the large number of victims, who were only gradually washed up on the surrounding beaches, death and the horrific experiences of the war remained present in the region until the 1950s, while at the same time tourists flocked to the coast again.