Dmitrij Kapitelman was born in Kyiv in 1986 and moved to Germany with his family at the age of eight. He studied political science and sociology at the University of Leipzig before graduating from the German School of Journalism in Munich. Today, he works as a freelance journalist.
His debut book, Das Lächeln meines unsichtbaren Vaters (2016), won the Klaus-Michael Kühne Prize. This was followed in 2021 by Eine Formalie in Kiew, which earned him the Ravensburger Verlag Foundation’s Family Novel Prize. Russische Spezialitäten (2025) was longlisted for the German Book Prize.