After World War II, Walter Kempowski (1929-2007) settled in Hamburg, but on returning to his hometown of Rostock in the late 1940s was sentenced by a Soviet military tribunal to twenty-five years in prison for espionage. His immense project Echo Soundings, which gathers firsthand accounts, diaries, letters, and memoirs of World War II, is considered a modern classic. NYRB Classics publishes his novel, All for Nothing.
Charlotte Collins studied English literature at Cambridge and was a radio journalist in Germany before becoming a literary translator. In 2017 she was awarded the Goethe-Institut's Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for her translation of Robert Seethaler's A Whole Life. She lives in London.