Ursula Hegi (born May 23, 1946) is a German-born American writer. She is currently an instructor in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.
She was born Ursula Koch in 1946 in Düsseldorf, Germany, a city that was heavily bombed during World War II. Her perception growing up was that the war was avoided as a topic of discussion despite its evidence everywhere, and The Holocaust was a particularly taboo topic. She moved to the United States in 1965, where she married (becoming Ursula Hegi) in 1967 and became a naturalized citizen the same year. She set her third, Floating in My Mother's Palm, in the fictional German town of "Burgdorf," using her writing to explore her conflicted feelings about her German heritage.
Short stories
- Unearned Pleasures and Other Stories (1988)
- Hotel of the Saints (2001)
Children's books
- Trudi & Pia (2003), with pictures by Gisele Potter
Non-fiction
- Tearing the Silence: On Being German in America (1998)