Tobias Wals (1993) studied Russian and East European Studies in Amsterdam and Slavistics in Leuven. He became fluent in Ukrainian after having spent nine months in Kyiv, where he accidentally ended up on his way to Russia. Wals works as a journalist for several Dutch news outlets and is currently a doctoral student at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich, where he researches the effects of the Holocaust on the Ukrainian city of Shytomyr. He furthermore translates Ukrainian literature into Dutch. Kyiv on the Bottom of a Glass is his fiction debut.