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Eugen Ruge was born in the Urals and studied mathematics in Berlin. Before leaving the GDR for the West in 1988 he was a writer, contributing to documentaries made at the state-owned DEFA Studios. Since 1989 he has been writing and translating for theatres and broadcasters, and periodically teaches at the Berlin University of the Arts. In Times of Fading Light, his first novel, was an international bestseller and won the German Book Prize. Anthea Bell was a freelance translator from German and French. Her translations include works of fiction and general nonfiction, books for young people, and classics by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Freud, Kafka, and Stefan Zweig. She won the UK Schlegel-Tieck award for translation from German (four times); the 2002 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (UK) and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize (USA), both for the translation of W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz; the 2003 Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation; and the 2009 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. |
