Yael Inokai
Yael Inokai (born Yael Pieren in 1989 in Basel) is a Swiss writer. She has a Hungarian father and a German mother. She studied philosophy in Basel and Vienna from 2011 and began studying screenwriting at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin in 2014. She also works as a tour guide and writes for literary magazines and Zeit Online.
Her debut novel Storchenbiss (Stork Bite) appeared in 2012 with Rotpunktverlag. In 2013 she received a residency at the Literary Colloquium Berlin. In 2015 she became Hildesheim Stadtschreiber on a nomination from the magazine Bella triste.
Her second novel Mahlstrom was published in 2017 and won a Swiss Literature Award in 2018. In 2018 she also won the Würth Literature Prize (second prize) for the short story Der Ausländer (The Foreigner).
Mahlstrom was adapted into a radio play by SRF in 2019 and broadcast in January 2020; Deutschlandfunk Kultur also aired it in December 2020. In 2020 she wrote the short story Der Anständige (The Decent One) for the ARD Radio Festival.
Her 2022 novel Ein simpler Eingriff (A Simple Intervention) is told from the perspective of a nurse and explores lesbian love and a society that tries to heal people through surgery. For this book she received the Anna Seghers Prize in 2022. Yael Inokai lives in Berlin and works as the director of textual studies.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 03:52 (CET).