Born in the small university town of Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, Dariya Manova went to a foreign language high school. After learning German, English, and Russian there, she did a six-month school exchange in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. During her three-year bachelor’s degree in German literature and philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin, she practiced her passion for literature and philosophy; both this, and her master’s degree were financed by a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship. Her BA thesis concentrated on the mixture of spatial theory, literature, and everyday journalism in Siegfried Kracauer’s texts for the Frankfurter Zeitung during the Weimar Republic. Her thesis, a four-month internship at the publishing house diaphanes, and also her teaching assistant position at Matala de Mazza’s chair for German literature, were all a great motivation to study for a master’s in literature. Organizing a student lecture series at the university and participating in both an international summer academy on the concept of minor utopias and a research colloquium acquainted Dariya with the Anthropocene discourse. It became central to her upcoming master’s thesis, whose main topics are energy resources (coal and oil) and infrastructure networks in the bestselling adventure novels of the German-Mexican writer B. Traven (1882–1969).