Monika Bilstein, born in 1958, trained as a bookseller. In 1987, she joined the Peter Hammer publishing house, where she became an authorised representative in 1993 and has been the managing director since 2001. She established an innovative children´s book list which is the main focus of the Peter Hammer publishing house, along with a long list of African and Latin Americanliterature. She has taken part in workshops for the Frankfurt Book Fair in Hanoi, Teheran, Lliv and Barcelona. She is a board member of the Association of Children´s Books Publishers and the Society for the Promotion of African, Asian and Latin American Literature.