Sheila Gutknecht (née McBride) was born and grown up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. After meeting her German husband-to-be at a Kibbutz in Israel, she left Belfast at the height of the Troubles in 1975 and has been living in Germany ever since. Never having lost a strong attachment to her home country, Sheila has always been deeply interested in the question of identity and what it means to be an outsider. Outsiders is her first short story collection.