Hans Fallada was one of the best-known German writers of the twentieth century. Born in 1893 in Greifswald as Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen, he took his pen name from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. His most famous works include the novels Little Man, What Now? and The Drinker. Fallada died from an overdose of morphine on 5 February 1947 in Berlin.Michael Hofmann is the author of several books of poems and a book of criticism, Behind the Lines, and the translator of many modern and contemporary authors. Penguin publish his translations of Kafkas Metamorphosis and Other Stories and Irmgard Keuns Child of All Nations.
Michael Hofmann won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for Roth's The Tale of the 1002nd Night by Joseph Roth.