About

Lena Müller is a poet, essayist and screenwriter. Born and raised in Munich, she lives in Berlin and writes in English and German. Her work is drawn to what happens just before speech: the pause, the false start, the sentence that never quite arrives.

Before she published anything, she spent six years on film sets, where she learned to listen to room tone, the half minute of silence recorded after every scene. That listening shaped her debut collection Room Tone (Linden & Fog, 2021), followed by the prose poems Things That Are Black, Angular, and Crisp (Pale Ink Editions, 2023) and Orange Streetlights (Hollow Bell Press, 2025). Her essay series Gwangju Diary, written during a summer in her grandmother's city, appears monthly in Tram Lines.

For the screen, she wrote and directed the short film I Meant to Say Something Else, selected for Bled Film Evenings in 2023, and is developing her first feature, False Starts, with Grey Harbour Pictures. Her performances and installations, including Internet Patchworking and Nearly, have been shown in Antwerp and Porto. She also works as a subtitler and teaches workshops on writing the pause.