IRMGARD KEUN (1905-1982) became a sensation in her native Germany with the 1931 publication of her first novel, Gilgi, when she was 21. But her second novel, The Artificial Silk Girl, landed her on the Nazi blacklist. Eventually sentenced to death, she fled the country and staged her own suicide...then snuck back into Germany where she lived undercover for the duration of the war. Anthea Bell is the recipient of the Schlegel Tieck Prize for translation from German, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize in 2002 for the translation of W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz, and the 2003 Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation. She lives in Cambridge, England.
Irmgard Keun was born in Berlin in 1905. She published her first novel, Gilgioacute;A Girl Just Like Us, in 1931. Her second novel, The Artificial Silk Girl, instantly became a bestseller. After the war, she resumed writing under the name of Charlotte Tralow, enjoying only modest success until her early works were rediscovered and reissued in the late 1970s. She died in 1982 in Cologne.