Bianca Schaalburg was born and raised in Berlin, where she studied Visual Communication at the UDK. Since finishing her studies, she has been illustrating children's books, wrote some of those, created comic strips, and cartoons, designed young adult book covers, games, as well as illustrations for school books and magazines. In 2021 her first graphic novel came out (at Avant Verlag), which tells the story of her family in Nazi Germany and after, until the end of the 1960s: Der Duft der Kiefern (The Scent of Pine Trees). It won her the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis Sachbuch 2022 (German young people's literature Award non-fiction). In 2023 and 2024, The Scent of Pine Trees will also be published in French and Norwegian (L'Agrume and Minuskel).

The film rights of The Scent of Pine Trees are represented by Agentur Simon.