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. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular works including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he moved to London, and later on to Bath, taking British citizenship after the outbreak of the Second World War. With the fall of France in 1940 Zweig left Britain for New York, before settling in Brazil, where he wrote The Royal Game in 1941. In 1942 Zweig and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.

Perhaps the best chess story ever written, perhaps the best about any game. Never mind that you may have never moved a pawn to King four; the story will grip you.