Siegfried Lenz was born in 1917 in East Prussia. In his forty-five years of writing, he has produced a wide range of short stories and novels, plays for the theater and other media, and several collections of critical essays, including his conversations with the psychoanalyst Manes Sperber and the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. He was awarded the prestigious Friedenpreis of the German Book Trade in 1988.