Marcel Grzanna was born in the Ruhr region in 1973. He spent most of his childhood on the carpeted floor of his nursery, where he replayed soccer matches in real time with a marble and commented on them live. His great-aunt believed even then that the boy would surely become a reporter one day. After graduating from high school and doing his military service, he fulfilled the prophecy and began working as a freelancer for the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. After a few years in local sports, Grzanna later traveled the world as an editor for a news agency, reporting from all sorts of world championships and Olympic Games. The desire to live abroad accompanied all those years. Grzanna learned Mandarin and moved to China in 2007, where he worked as an economic correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung. In 2016, he returned to Europe. In Málaga, southern Spain, he wrote "A Society in Bondage" (Goldmann-Verlag), a field report about the intense daily life of foreign journalists in the world's largest surveillance state. Since 2020, Marcl Grzanna has been living in Cologne as a freelance writer.