IRINA LIEBMANN WAS BORN IN Moscow in 1943. Her mother was Russian and her father a German citizen forced to flee the fascism of the Third Reich. During her early years in the Soviet Union, the young Liebmann learned to speak both German and Russian. In 1945, with the end of the war, the family returned to Berlin, the city that would influence Liebmann's life and work for years to come.

Liebmann attended the University of Leipzig, where she studied Chinese language and culture. Unable to find a job in this field after China and the Soviet Union (and therefore East Germany) split politically, she signed on to be an editor at a magazine focusing on foreign policy and Third World development. In 1975, she became a freelance journalist.

Ms. Liebmann considers journalism the least egoistical form of writing. This attitude has made its mark on her as a writer. She has an unassuming style, and common themes in her works reveal a dedication to realism and exactness and a desire to represent familiar environments as truthfully as possible. It was from her experience as a journalist that her first book, Berliner Mietshaus, stemmed.

Published in 1981, Berliner Mietshaus is the product of a journalistic experiment, as well as evidence of one of the important running themes in Liebmann's work — the city of Berlin. Having lived first in East Berlin, then West Berlin, and finally united Berlin, she often sets her works in this city. This particular experiment involved interviewing as many inhabitants of an East Berlin tenement as were willing to participate. She employed no specific list of questions, no tape recorder. The book is simply a collection of conversations held over coffee or tea and brought together into a beautiful portrait of everyday life.

After Berliner Mietshaus came further books, poems, plays, and radio dramas. She published Mitten im Krieg in 1989, and Quatschfresser. Theaterstücke in 1990. In Berlin, published in 1994, is an excellent example of her work blending prose and poetry. Many of the chapters are written in lyric verse. Though it is fiction, it is told from a very personal point of view, through the eyes of a character named for the author.