Born in 1875, Thomas Mann was a German writer of novels, short stories, and essays who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. He began his writing career by contributing short stories to magazines, and he published his first novel Buddenbrooks in 1901. When Hitler came to power, Mann left Germany to live in Switzerland and became a key contributor to the Exilliteratur, which was composed of work written by German authors who fled the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. Throughout World War II, he was vocal in his opposition to the Nazis, and he was later suspected of being a communist when he lived in the US during the 1950s. He eventually returned to Switzerland where he died in 1955. Shaun Whiteside is a Northern Irish translator of French, Dutch, German, and Italian literature. He has translated many novels, including Manituana and Altai by Wu Ming, The Weekend by Bernhard Schlink, Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq, and Magdalene the Sinner by Lilian Faschinger, which won him the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German Translation in 1997. Since May 2021, he has served as the president of the European Council of Literary Translators' Associations.

Karolina Watroba is a former Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. She is now a Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She teaches modern literature, film, and culture, specializing in European modernism and its global reception and continuing relevance today.