Some reviewers noticed that his name was missing from the long list for the 2007 German Book Prize: Michael Kleeberg. The jury has now selected him as Mainz City Writer for 2008.

The new Mainz City Writer Michael Kleeberg was born in Stuttgart in 1959 and grew up in Böblingen and near Hamburg. In addition to studying politics and visual communication, he worked as a journalist, nurse, and dock worker. In 1984, his first collection of short stories, Böblinger Brezeln, was published and praised for its keen powers of observation. After spending time in Rome, West Berlin, and Amsterdam, he moved to Paris in 1986, where he worked as a co-owner of an advertising agency in addition to his writing activities.

Kleeberg is particularly interested in depicting the connection between personal history and contemporary history. This is evident in his highly acclaimed novel Ein Garten im Norden (A Garden in the North, 1998), which brings the early twentieth century to life, as well as in his novel Der König von Korsika (The King of Corsica, 2001) about the life of Baron Theodor Neuhoff, whose fate takes him through 18th-century Europe. Kleeberg's new novel,

Karlmann, was published in August 2007. Through a meticulous exploration of a few days in the life of the average man Charly between 1985 and 1989, the author uses very different registers of language to examine everyday life in all its aspects, thus getting to the bottom of the fascination of the banal. "Everyday life is life itself. At the same time, it is terra incognita," says the author.

Kleeberg, who also works as a translator from French (Proust, Huysmans) and English (Dos Passos), has received the Anna Seghers Prize (1996) and the Lion Feuchtwanger Prize (2000), among others, and has been honored with two working scholarships from the German Literature Fund. Kleeberg lived as a freelance writer and translator in Burgundy before settling in Berlin in 2000.