Kári Driscoll studied German and Italian at Wadham College, Oxford, and completed his PhD in German at Columbia University in New York with a dissertation on the “poetics of animality” in the works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Luigi Pirandello and Franz Kafka. He is a lecturer in comparative literature at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. In 2011 he was awarded the inaugural Gutekunst Prize for Young Translators, for his translation of an excerpt from Martin Mosebach's novel “Was davor geschah”.