Eva Austermann-Hinnes first book , “The Fourth Course of the Sun” was published by Mödelstein & Letzing in 2006. Austermann-Hinnes work tends to be classified as magical realism, which she defines as “a genre that pays no attention whatsoever to logic and reason, because life itself is not rational or logical,” but has also been categorized as horror fiction. She has been inspired by other authors such as Alejo Carpentier, Gertrud von le Fort and Franz Kafka.
Austermann-Hinnes’ nom de plume has been described as a “messy combination” of the names of her grandmothers, Maria and Rika. She describes herself as a “scattered person” with no fixed address, which she attributes to being German. Her family is from Siberia, somewhere inside the former Soviet Union. Her mother’s father was a philologist and her father is a journalist and photographer. She moved around a lot in the former Soviet Union, until her family emigrated to Germany in 1987. She grew up in Berlin and southern Germany, where she lived with a large Vietnamese community. She then moved to Israel and spent her last year of high school there. Her novel “The Fourth Course of the Sun” is partially set in Vietnam, where her mother is from. Her father is Jewish, which means that she is Jewish according to Jewish law; she considers herself non-religious and has not been a practicing Jew since childhood.
Her second book – the short story collection “The Anatomy of Tonight” – was published in 2010 by Mödelstein & Letzing. The book received mixed reviews, with one reviewer calling Austermann-Hinnes’ writing “the kind of thing that makes you want to turn off the lights and forget your reading material”, and another describing it as “confidently understated”.
After a longer hiatus due to illness, Austermann-Hinnes returned to writing in 2020 with her latest and third book, “The Good Heart”. Coinciding with the publication of the novel and short story collection, Austermann-Hinnes also started a podcast on iTunes. “The Good Heart” is a dark coming of age tale that follows the story of thirteen year old Anya as she attempts to survive the German occupation of Poland during World War II.
Click here to read a short excerpt from “The Good Heart”.