Christine Lavant (1915-1973) was an Austrian writer of prose and poetry. The last of nine children in a nearly destitute miner's family, she was plagued by ill health throughout her life, spending time in hospitals and a sanitorium during her childhood and early adulthood. She married in the late 1930s, and in 1945, inspired by reading Rilke's late poems, she began writing thousands of pages of poetry and prose all while supporting herself and her husband with needlework. She won several awards for her writing and gave a few public readings during her lifetime, but she retreated into relative seclusion in her later years.

Tess Lewis is a translator from French and German. For New York Review Books, she has translated work by Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, and Lutz Seiler.