Martin Walser is one of Germany’s most prominent and prolific postwar writers, a contemporary of Heinrich Böll, Günther Grass, and Christa Wolf. Born in Wasserburg, on Lake Constance, in 1927, he is the author of numerous novels, stories, and plays, including A Runaway Horse. After A Gushing Fountain was published in 1998, he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. He lives in Germany.
David Dollenmayer is a literary translator and emeritus professor of German at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. Winner of the 2008 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize and the 2010 Translation Prize of the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York, he lives in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.