Bulgarian-born writer Ilija Trojanow is Mainz's city writer for 2007. Ilija Trojanow (41) is the 23rd recipient of the prize, which is endowed with 12,500 euros. Like his predecessor Patrick Roth, he will produce a documentary on a topic of his choice in collaboration with ZDF and move into the city writer's apartment in Mainz's Gutenberg Museum.

Ilija Trojanow was born in Sofia in 1965 and fled to Germany with his parents in 1971. From 1972 onwards, he grew up in Kenya and Munich. Trojanow is the second German-language migrant writer after Libuse Moniková (1994) to receive the Mainz City Writer Award. From 1985 to 1989, he studied law and ethnology at the University of Munich. In 1989, Trojanow founded the ethnographic Kyrill-und-Method Verlag publishing house in Munich, followed by Marino-Verlag in 1992.

Trojanow made his debut in 1996 with the highly acclaimed novel "Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall" (The World is Big and Salvation Lurks Everywhere), a book with an autobiographical background that colorfully tells an Eastern European family saga. In 1997, Trojanow wrote the internet novel "Autopol," a science fiction story, on behalf of the cultural magazine "aspekte" on ZDF. The world-traveling writer spent several years in India from 1999 onwards, which inspired him to write several books.

His travelogue "An den inneren Ufern Indiens. Eine Reise entlang des Ganges" (On the Inner Shores of India: A Journey Along the Ganges) was a great success with readers and critics alike in 2003. In 2004, his book "Zu den heiligen Quellen des Islam
" (To the Holy Sources of Islam) was published, an account of his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina.

His greatest success to date is the novel "Der Weltensammler" (The World Collector) (2006), a bestseller that was honored with the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and a nomination for the German Book Prize. In the novel, he describes the life of the British explorer and orientalist Richard F. Burton in the 19th century, who traveled around the English colonies and tried to adopt the customs of foreign cultures. It is an exciting and multi-voiced adventure novel about an eccentric who rebelled against the colonialist spirit of the times.

Ilija Trojanow lives in Munich and Cape Town and has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Bertelsmann Literature Prize (1995), the Marburg Literature Prize (1996), the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize (2000), and a scholarship from Villa Aurora in Los Angeles (2006).