Michael Martens

Michael Martens was born in 1973 in Hamburg. He worked for several north German regional newspaper while still in school and after finishing secondary school and after one year in Chicago, he worked on a project financed by the German foreign office as an editor of German-Russian newspapers. He sent a year in each of the cities of Bishkek (as an editor of the Newspaper of Germans in Kyrgyzstan), Almaty (the then-capital of Kazakhstan) and Kiev. At the end of the project, he worked with the “St. Petersburgische Zeitung” that was established in 1727. He travelled to Central Asia, Pakistan, Afganistan, visited many regions in the Ukraine and several in Russia and wrote reports for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the FAZ. In 2001, he started at the news desk of the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung where he was occupied with the events in the CIS and Afghanistan. He reported from Afghanistan during the war of the US against the Taliban and changed the location afterwards: in summer 2002, he went to Serbia and was FAZ’s correspondent for the Balkans with a head office in Belgrade for the following seven years. In summer 2009, he moved again, this time to Istanbul.