© Darjush Davar

Mikael Ross (Munich, 1984) was trained as a costume designer at the Bavarian State Opera before moving to the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin.

After finishing his studies in Berlin, where he now lives, he specialized at the ESA Saint-Luc in Brussels, where he met the Belgian scriptwriter and cartoonist Nicolas Wouters. Together they published the graphic novels Les pieds dans le béton (Feet in Concrete - 2013) and Totem (2016), which was a finalist for the price Révélation ADAGP at the Festival Quai des bulles of Saint-Malo and also won the Pépites award at the Salon du Livre et de la presse Jeunesse of Montreuil.

In 2019, Ross published his first solo graphic novel, Der Umfall (The Accident - pending to be published by Reservoir Books and to be translated into eight languages), which was nominated for the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis at the Frankfurt Book Fair and in 2020 won probably the country's most prestigious award; the Max und Moritz-Preis for the best German comic at the Erlangen Comic Festival.

As part of the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the birth of the musical genius Beethoven, the prestigious Beethoven Society commissioned a small comic book about the artist's life, which was the first seed of Goldjunge: Beethovens Jugendjahre (The Young Ludwig), originally published in 2020, already translated into four languages and acclaimed by international critics.