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. 

Reemtsma, Jan Philipp

Born in 1952 in Bonn, Reemtsma lives in Hamburg.

Founder of the Institut für Sozialforschung, the Arno Schmidt Stiftung and Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur. Literary scholar and Professor of German literature at the University of Hamburg since 1996.

Reemtsma received several awards, among others the Lessing Preis in 1997, Teddy Kollek Prize in 2007 and Schillerpreis in 2010.

Roduner, Markus

Markus Roduner is a translator and a linguist. He was born on 6 February 1967 in the city of Rheinfelden, Switzerland. He studied philology of the Slavonic and Baltic languages, historical-comparative linguistics at Bern University. In 1991, underwent training in Lithuania and Georgia. From 1992 to 1995 he lived in Lithuania, worked at the Department of Press and Information at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania, and as a teacher of the German language. In 1996, he returned to his native Switzerland where he continued his studies, worked as a teacher and taught German to foreigners. In 2001, he completed his studies with a thesis on syntax of the Lithuanian and Karaim languages. Since 1999 he has been living in Lithuania – since 2000 in the town of Šiauliai. He is working as a freelance translator.

Since 2004 he has been organising the annual international prose festival “Days of European Literature in Šiauliai”, since 2013 also an international festival for youth literature. In 2008, he was awarded the Culture and Art Prize of the town of Šiauliai, in 2009, he received the St. Jeronimus Prize.

Johnson, Uwe

Uwe Johnson (1934–1984), born in Cammin (nowadays Poland), grew up in the small town of Anklam in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. At the end of World War II, his father, who had joined the Nazi Party in 1940, disappeared into a Soviet camp; he was declared dead in 1948. Johnson and his mother remained in Communist East Germany until his mother left for the West in 1956, after which Johnson was barred from regular employment. In 1959, shortly before the publication of his first novel, Speculations About Jakob, in West Germany, he emigrated to West Berlin by streetcar, leaving the East behind for good. Other novels, The Third Book About Achim, An Absence, and Two Views, followed in quick succession. A member of the legendary Gruppe 47, Johnson lived from 1966 until 1968 with his wife and daughter in New York, compiling a high-school anthology of postwar German literature. On Tuesday, April 18, 1967, at 5:30 p.m., as he later recounted the story, he saw Gesine Cresspahl, a character from his earlier works, walking on the south side of Forty-Second Street from Fifth to Sixth Avenue alongside Bryant Park; he asked what she was doing in New York and eventually convinced her to let him write his next novel about a year in her life. Anniversaries was published in four installments—in 1970, 1971, 1973, and 1983—and was quickly recognized in Germany as one of the great novels of the century. In 1974, Johnson left Germany for the isolation of Sheerness-on-Sea, England, where he struggled through health and personal problems to finish his magnum opus. He died at age forty-nine, shortly after it was published.

Veit, Birgit

Born in Essen in 1948, Birgit Veit studied Slavic philology, Literature, Latin and Greek philology and Theology in Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin and Leningrad. She now lives in Berlin.
For six years she worked as research fellow for Slavic literature history at Freie Universität Berlin; since 1985 as a free lance translator from Russian to German, as interpreter and journalist.