Anthea Bell was born in Suffolk, United Kingdom on May 10, 1936. She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford. She worked as a translator, primarily from German and French. Her translations included works of non-fiction, literary and popular fiction, and books for young people. The first book she ever translated was Otfried Preussler's children's book The Little Water-Sprite. She also translated works by the Brothers Grimm, Clemens Brentano, Wilhelm Hauff, Christian Morgenstern, Stefan Zweig, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Cornelia Funke, and E. T. A. Hoffman.
She received numerous translation prizes and awards including the 1987 Schlegel-Tieck Award for Hans Berman's The Stone and the Flute, the Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation for Christine Nöstlinger's A Dog's Life, the 2002 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for her translation of W.G. Sebald's novel Austerlitz, and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize in 2009 for How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone. She also received Germany's Verdienstkreuz in 2015 and was appointed OBE in 2010. She died on October 18, 2018 at the age of 82.
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