About

Born on the Baltic coast, Stefan Kiesbye moved to Berlin in the 1980s. He studied drama and worked in radio before starting a degree in American studies, English, and comparative literature at Berlin’s Free University. A scholarship brought him to Buffalo, New York, in 1996.  His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. His first book, Next Door Lived a Girl, won the Low Fidelity Press Novella Award, and has been translated into German, Dutch, and Spanish.

Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone made EW’s Must List and was named one of the best books of 2012 by Slate editor Dan Kois. It has been translated into Spanish and German and optioned for television.

Ars Vivendi Verlag released the LA Noir Fluchtpunkt Los Angeles (Vanishing Point) in February 2015, and The Staked Plains, a novella, was published by Saddle Road Press that same year. Knives, Forks, Scissors, Flames (Panhandler Books) came out in October 2016, and German newspaper Die Welt called Kiesbye “the inventor of the modern German Gothic novel.”

Cyber-punk Berlingeles was published in 2018, and But I Don’t Know You (Saddle Road Press) — a book about memory, language, and loss — in 2022. Kiesbye’s No Sound to Break, No Moment Clear, won the 2020 Brighthorse Prize in the Novel and was released in 2022.

His lates book is the novella The Nine Thoughts, published by Broken Tribe Press.

He teaches creative writing at Sonoma State University in San Francisco’s North Bay Area.

E-mail: skiesbyeATgmailDOTcom