Maja (Thesilée) Ilisch IF

Thesilée is a filker and writer from Germany. Coming from a folk background, her songs are inspired by classic English folk ballads not only in their tendency to be rather long, but also in them focusing on bloodshed, murder, vengeful spirits, and death. It's less known that she's also keen on writing sloppy love songs, but luckily she manages to mix in a little death with those as well. She writes songs in German and English and likes to translate not only her own songs but also fellow filkers' works from one language to the other, and though she claims she does so to further international understanding, actually she's in it for the fun.

Thesilée is notoriously left-handed and plays the guitar, mandola or bass as long as it's strung the other way round, and has recently been taking up playing the washboard, following her mother's footsteps (which can be played in either hand). A studied librarian and trained bookseller, she has given up the idea of being actually paid for her work and became a freelance writer in 2012, writing - and publishing! - books that are just as full of blood, death and fairies as her songs.

All of her lyrics can be found at www.thesilee.de - for information on her writing, which is all in German, got to www.ilisch.de