Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Between the wars, Zweig was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he left Austria to live in London, Bath and New York - a period during which he produced his most celebrated works: his best-known novel, Beware of Pity, and his memoir, The World of Yesterday. He eventually settled in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.Will Stone born 1966, is a poet, essayist and literary translator who divides his time between Suffolk and the European continent. His translations from French and German include works by Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gérard de Nerval, Georg Simmel, Maurice Betz, Guy de Pourtalès, Emile Verhaeren and Georges Rodenbach. His most recent translations were a collection of letters by Rilke from French, Letters around a Garden (Seagull Books, 2024) and Conversations with Rilke, a memoir by the poet's French translator Maurice Betz (Pushkin, 2025).Ryan Holiday is the author of Trust Me, I'm Lying, The Obstacle Is The Way, Ego Is The Enemy, and other books about marketing, culture, and the human condition. His work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared everywhere from the Columbia Journalism Review to Fast Company. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Zweig's accumulated historical and cultural studies remain a body of achievement almost too impressive to take in