Three Tearless Histories

Erich Hackl is an award-winning Austrian author. He was born in Steyr (Upper Austria) in 1954. He studied German and Hispanic Studies in Salzburg and Malaga and was a lecturer for three years at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. On his return to Austria, Hackl was a Spanish teacher and a lecturer at the University of Vienna. Since 1983 he has worked as a translator, editor and freelance writer. He has been a regular contributor to the Wiener Tagebuch, editor of the Aurora-Library, a book series of international poetry, and he is a regular contributor to the WochenZeitung in Zurich. He has published numerous Hispanic literature anthologies, and is recipient of over a dozen literature and translation prizes, including the Premio Hidalgo, the Solothurner Literaturpreis, the Literature Prize of the City of Vienna, and the Austrian Prize for Literary Translation. Mike Mitchell is an award-winning translator of French and German who has been active as a translator for over thirty years. He is the recipient of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for translations of German works published in Britain, has won the British Comparative Literature Association translation competition three times, and has been shortlisted for many awards including the French-American Translation Prize, the Weidenfeld prize, the Aristeion prize, the Kurt Wolff prize, and the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger. In 2012 the Austrian Ministry of Education, Art and Culture awarded him a lifetime achievement award as a translator of literary works. He lives in Scotland.

"Erich Hackl's subjects are all actual events, fates and biographies. Often with considerable research and effort, he digs deep into the histories of people whose destiny very often have to do with Nazism and / or with Judaism. In his new collection of short [non-fiction] stories Three tearless histories, two of which are already published in Austria in newspapers and anthologies, Hackl tells of Jewish people and their destinies. [...] These stories get under one's skin." - Winfried Stanzick, Top Ten Review for Bucher.de, July 9, 2015 "Highly recommended, ... a haunting book." - Samuel Moser Neue Zurcher Zeitung, September 13, 2014 "The books of Erich Hackl have now been translated into 25 languages. As a chronicler, he reminds us of the fate of people who were arrested for racial reasons or because of their political convictions, tortured and murdered. Hackl reconstructs the biographies of those who have been erased from history. [...] He takes care to strive for historical accuracy." - Michael Opitz, Deutschlandradio Kultur

• Note by the Translator The Klagsbrunn Family: A Story Coming to LightThe Photographer of AuschwitzTschofenig: The Name Behind the StreetAcknowledgments