Reinhard Kleist was born in 1970 near Cologne. After graduating from the School of Graphic Art and Design in Munster, he moved to Berlin, where he has lived and worked as a freelance comics artist and illustrator ever since. Kleist’s books have been translated into many languages and have received several prizes. His graphic novel Johnny Cash: I See A Darkness was nominated for both the Eisner and Harvey awards, as well as receiving the Max und Moritz Prize for the Best German-language Comic. With The Boxer, Kleist became the first cartoonist to receive the German Youth Literature Award. An Olympic Dream was serialised in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung before being published, with some revisions, as a graphic novel.