Barbara Pumhösel was born in Neustift bei Scheibbs, Austria, in 1959. After living in various countries (Great Britain and France) and doing a variety of jobs, she took her degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Vienna. Since 1988 she has lived in a Bagno a Ripoli, a suburb of Florence, and at the present is working with a project aimed at introducing literature into primary and secondary schools and with the editors of the children's fiction section of a Florentine publishing house. She contributes to several periodicals and has published stories and poetry in anthologies in Italy and abroad and in the journals "L'Area di Broca", "Semicerchio" and "Sagarana on-line", "Das Gedicht"(Germany) and "Podium"(Austria). In 2000 and again in 2003 she was awarded the Alpi Apuane Prize for unpublished poetry. In 2004 a collection of her poems appeared in the anthology Pulvis, coperta maternal, published by Edizioni Gazebo in Florence.