Irina Liebmann is a German journalist-author and sinologist of Russo-German provenance. She has won a number of important literary prizes: the most significant of these, probably, was the 2008 Leipzig Book Fair non-fiction Prize, awarded for "Wäre es schön? Es wäre schön!", a biography of her father, a noted anti-Nazi activist and political exile in Warsaw and Moscow who, after 1945, returned to what became, in 1949, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and in 1953, despite his longstanding record of communist activism, emerged as an uncompromising critic of the East German leader Walter Ulbricht: he was expelled from the party and suffered various other government mandated public indignities. She grew up and lived the first part of her adult life in the German Democratic Republic, but succeeded in moving to West Berlin during 1988, thereby anticipating reunification by more than a year.