John E. Woods was born in Indiana in 1942. He lived in Berlin, Germany, where he died in February 2023. He has worked as an editor and is the translator from the German of over forty books. Among the authors he has translated are: Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin, Arno Schmidt, Patrick Süskind, Christoph Ransmayr, Libuse Monikova, and Ingo Schulze. His prizes and awards include: the American Book Award for Translation and the PEN Translation Prize (1981) for Arno Schmidt, Evening Edged in Gold; the PEN Translation Prize (1987) for Patrick Süskind, Perfume; the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for Translation (1990) for Christoph Ransmayr, The Last World; the PEN West Literary Award in Translation, the German Literary Prize of the American Translator’s Association, and an Outstanding Translation Award of the American Literary Translation Association (1995) for Arno Schmidt, Collected Novellas; the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize (1996) for Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain and Arno Schmidt, Nobodaddy’s Children. In 2008 he also was awarded the Goethe Medal of the Federal Republic of Germany for his contribution to making German culture available to English speaking readers. He has recently completed his translation of Arno Schmidt’s Zettel’s Traum (Eng. Bottom’s Dream), which will be published in the fall of 2016.