Otfried Preussler (1923 - 2013) was a German author of children's books. Drafted into the German army during World War II, Preussler was taken prisoner in 1944 when he was 21 years old and spent the next five years in POW camps in the Tatar Republic. After his release, he became a primary school teacher and began writing and publishing children's stories that would one day be translated into over 55 languages. He was awarded the 1972 German Youth Literature Prize for Krabat. <p/>Anthea Bell (1936-2018) was the recipient of the 2009 Schlegel-Tieck Prize for her translation of Stefan Zweig's Burning Secret. In 2002 she won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for her translation of W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz. Her translations of Zweig's novellas Confusion and Journey into the Past are available as NYRB Classics.