Lenz, Siegfried

Born in Lyck, East Prussia, in 1926, Lenz died in Hamburg in 2014. He was one the most renowned German post war prose writers and became an honorary citizen of Hamburg in 2002 and of Schleswig-Holstein in 2004. In 2011 even the honorary citzen of his hometown, nowadays the Polish Ełk. 
Among the numerous literary prizes he received were the Thomas-Mann-Preis in 1984, the Goethe prize in 1999 and the Goethe medal in 2002. 

Gladkich, Sergey

Born in Kalach-on-the-Don in 1952, Gladkich studied German and French at the "Maurice Thorez" State University for Foreign Languages in Moscow. Since 1976 he has been living in Berlin (GDR). 

Member of the PEN Germany. Working as a translator from German and French to Russian and from Russian to German, as well as a sculptor, painter and actor.

Boehlich, Walter

Born in Breslau in 1921, Walter Boehlich read philology at the University of Bonn and became the assistant of Prof. Ernst Robert Curtius. After he had left university, he became a profiled journalist, literary critic (Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine), literary editor (at Suhrkamp Verlag and later Verlag der Autoren Frankfurt) and translator from French, Spanish and Danish, among others of Herman Bang, Hjalmar Söderberg, Marguerite Duras or Victor Jara.
Walter Boehlich was a member of Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung until his death in Hamburg in 2006.
He received the Johann Heinrich Merck Prize in 1990, the Jane Scatcherd Translator Prize in 1997, the Heinrich Mann Prize and the Wilhelm Merton Prize for European Translations in 2001.    

Wagner, Isabelle

Born in Saarbrücken, Germany, in 1973, Isabelle Wagner studied English, German and American literature and obtained a Master's Degree from the Universität des Saarlandes. In the course of her studies, she spent time abroad in Ireland and the USA. Her interest in Sweden was first kindled by Astrid Lindgren's books, but it was only when she became acquainted with the work of 20th-century writer Karin Boye that she seriously began learning Swedish. Having worked in a wide range of professions including office administration, teaching and filling bagels, she discovered that literary translation was her true calling when she translated Mare Kandre's novel Aliide, Aliide.
Apart from her contribution as a translator, Isabelle has volunteered at the virtual Baltic Sea Library as a project assistant, helping with international correspondence, research and data management.  

Urban-Halle, Peter

Born in Halle/Saale in 1951, Peter Urban-Halle grew up in Dortmund and studied German and Scandinavian Philology in Berlin and Copenhagen.

Since 1980 he works as a literary critic and translator in Berlin. Among other Danish writers he translated Per Højholt, Jens Christian Grøndahl and Peter Høeg.

In 2010 he received the Encouragement Award of the Europäischer Übersetzerpreis Offenburg, and most recently, in 2013, the Danish Translators' Prize.

Katz, Josef

Josef Katz (1918-1990), the son of a leather merchant, was 23 years old in 1941 when the Nazis deported him from his home in Lübeck, Germany, to internment ghettos and concentration camps in Latvia. He would endure four years of unrelenting brutality in Riga, Kaiserwald, Stutthof, numbers of smaller camps, and a death march in Germany, where he was finally liberated. Returning home to Lübeck, Katz began recording his intense memories as a diary, completing it in 1946 in New York, where he emigrated with his new wife.
In New York, Katz was employed as a shipping clerk, before he established himself in a textile concern in Los Angeles, where he died in 1990.
His memoir book was first published in English translation in 1976.