Judith Schalansky was born in Greifswald in former East Germany in 1980 and studied art history and communication design. Her international best-seller, Atlas of Remote Islands, won the Stiftung Buchkunst (the Art Book Award) for "the most beautifully designed book of the year", while her novel The Giraffe's Neck in the English translation by Shaun Whiteside won a special commendation of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for the best translation from German in 2015.
Both books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Schalansky works as a freelance writer and book designer in Berlin, where she is also publisher of a prestigious natural history list at Matthes und Seitz.
JACKIE SMITH studied German and French at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and then undertook a post-graduate diploma in translation and interpreting at the University of Bradford. In2015 she was selected for the New Books in German Emerging Translators Programme and in 2017 won the Austrian Cultural Forum London Translation Prize.
An Inventory of Losses is her firstliterary translation, for which she is the winner of the 2021 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize.