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From there, Irene backpacked to Kenya, where she worked for famed paleontologist Louia Leakey. She returned to the United States in 1972. Back in her home country, she enrolled at Harvard University, majoring in Literature and Anthropology. After graduation, Irene worked as a freelance journalist, publishing in The New Yorker and The Nation. In the early 1980s, Irene moved to Berlin, Germany, a place where she still spends a considerable amount of time.

In 1986, Irene produced the documentary film Zacharias (1986). The film was based on her own script about her father, a Jew from Lemberg, who – having grown up in Vienna – fled to America through France to become one of the most distinguished biochemists of his generation. It was broadcast on the ZDF.

Before Dische started to write novels she worked as a scriptwriter on her project The Jewess.

In 1989, Dische published her first novel Pious Secrets. The book became a bestseller throughout Europe and was translated into fifteen languages. In 1993, Dische made her first appearance as a children's author alongside co-writer Magnus Enzensberger, publishing Esterhazy, the tale of a hare searching for love in the Berlin of the late 1980s. Her next children's book, Zwischen zwei Scheiben Glück (1997; Eng. Between Two Seasons of Happiness, 1998) tells the tale of a young Jewish boy who, following Reichspogromnacht, was sent into exile by his father, to stay with his seemingly stern grandfather in Hungary. The novel was awarded the German Young People's Literature Award and was also released as an audio book.

Dische's most recent novel was also her most successful one. The Empress of Weehawken, Irene's autobiography told from the point of view of her grandmother, was released in 2005 to significant critical acclaim. This book does a number of things beautifully, even brilliantly. It looks at the America of the 1950s and 1960s from a European refugee's point of view, in all the infant superpower's naivete, self-importance and glistening material success, as the refugees struggle to make the dream work for them too. It explains how life can appear to a person who is both a believer and a painfully practical realist. It also shows how character is inherited yet subtly altered over the generations.

The real grandeur of The Empress of Weehawken, however, lies in the narrator's voice. Pure as a bell, always unerringly true to character, Frau Rother is drawn as accurately as the slice of a surgeon's scalpel. And that's what the author is doing here, performing autopsies on the characters of her family. The writer is the real medical examiner.

The book was also a notable commercial success, selling over half a million copies in Germany alone. In 2007, she released a collection of short stories, entitled Loves.

With Hans Magnus Enzensberger she wrote the libretto for Aulis Sallinen's fifth opera The Palace. Irene worked with her best friend, Author and Literature Nobel Prize Winner, Elfried Jelinek, on several projects.

In 2008 her book The Job was made into the German television movie "Ein Job" starring Vanessa Redgrave.

An American Husband (German title Schwarz und Weiss) is an entertaining new love story between a mannequin, a white monster and a saint in NY in Woody Allen Style. "It gives the audience an emotional rollercoaster ride through recent American history. In the manner of a fabulist like John Irving, she lets one catastrophe crash after another and thus creates a moral painting of today" (SRF).

Recently Irene started to work on her new novel which will be adapted as a screenplay for an international coproduction.

Artist interview with Irene Dische and the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation:

Promotion Irene Dische by Hoffmann & Campe. In her bestselling novel "The Empress of Weehawken" Irene describes her grandparents, a former Jewish hospital director and his German catholic wife. They emigrated into US-exile during World War II. The novel is well suited for an international miniseries about the immigration experience of Irene's grandparents, and about three strong and rebellious women that were directly affected by the Holocaust.

Interview about Trump's politics with bestselling author Irene Dische in the talk show "Anne Will".

About Irene's new novel "Schwarz und Weiss". English title: "Florida Man". 

Irene Dische: "A Strange Feeling" (beginning from minute 16:43)