Dach, Simon

Simon Dach was born in 1605 in Memel in East Prussia, which is now the Lithuanian city of Klaipėda. His father worked as a court interpreter and, between 1619 and 1625, Dach attended schools in Königsberg, Wittenberg und Magdeburg. In 1626 he enrolled at the University of Königsberg and remained in the city until his death in 1659. In 1639, after working for six years as a secondary school teacher, he was appointed Professor of Poetry at the university.

Schmidgall, Renate

Renate Schmidgall, born in Heilbronn, is a German translator from Polish. She studied Germanic and Slavic Studies at Heidelberg University. From 1984 to 1990 she worked as a librarian, from 1990 to 1996 as a research assistant at the German Polish Institute in Darmstadt. Since then, she is a freelance translator for Polish literature. The best-known authors she has translated are: Stefan Chwin, Witold Gombrowicz, Paweł Huelle, Andrzej Stasiuk and Mirosław Nahacz.

Renate Schmidgall lives in Darmstadt. For her work she received the Jane Scatcherd price of the Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation in 2001 and the European Translation Prize Offenburg in 2006. In 2009 she was awarded the Dedecius price jointly with Karl Ryszard Wojnakowski.

Kreutzer, Gert

Studied Germanic Philology, Latin and Scandinavian Studies in Münster, Tübingen and Kiel
PhD and habilitation in Kiel, 1970-1990 assistant, associate professor and professor in Kiel
1990-2005 director of the Institute of Nordic Philology / Scandinavian Studies at the University of Cologne
Numerous publications on the history of literature and culture of the Nordic countries, many translations of poetry and prose from English and the Nordic languages​​, especially from Icelandic.
Gert Kreutzer was awarded with the Icelandic Order of the Falcon and was president of the German-Icelandic society in Cologne.

Grössel, Hanns

Born in Leipzig in 1931, Grössel studied German literature, Romanic literature and philosophy in Göttingen and Paris. Doctorate 1960. Worked 1960-1966 as a publishing house reader, 1966-1997 as a radio journalist in Cologne and continuously as a translator, editor and critic in the fields of Danish, French and Swedish literature. Hanns Grössel died in Cologne on 1st August, 2012.

Prizes (selection): 1976 Translators' prize of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, 1991 Translators' prize „Natur och Kultur“ of the Swedish Academy, 1995 Prize for European Poetry of the Town of Münster (together with Inger Christensen), 1996 Alfred-Kerr-Prize for Literary Criticism, 2010 European Translators' Prize of the Town of Offenburg; 2002-2004: awarded with the German Translators' Union's Hieronymus ring.

Mann, Thomas

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) achieved fame with his first novel, Buddenbrooks (1901), which recounts the story of the physical decline of a once vigorous merchant family as it turns from business to the arts. Mann’s other works include Death in Venice (1912), The Magic Mountain (1924), the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers (1933–43), and Doctor Faustus (1947). Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 “in particular for [...] Buddenbrooks [...] as a classic work of modern times“, by 1930 the number of copies published had crossed the one-million mark.

Thomas Mann left Germany in 1933 after the Nazi seizure of power, lived in Switzerland, and then moved to the United States in 1939. After his return to Switzerland in the year 1952 he died in Zurich on 12th August 1955.

See also Helmut Koopmann (ed): Thomas-Mann-Handbuch, Stuttgart 1990 and Hermann Kurzke: Thomas Mann. Das Leben als Kunstwerk, Munich 1999, Frankfurt am Main 2002.