Kazimierz Moczarski

Kazimierz Moczarski was born in Warsaw in 1907, and studied law at Warsaw University and the Sorbonne. During the Nazi Germany occupation of Poland, he fought as an officer in the Polish Resistance. In 1945, he was arrested by the new Communist regime as an enemy of the state, and was sentenced to ten years in prison. It was during this time that he was locked up with the Nazi war criminal, Jürgen Stroop. After his release, Moczarski worked as a journalist, and began writing his masterpiece, Conversations with an Executioner. Moczarski died in 1975, weakened by years of torture during his time in prison.

Sean Gasper Bye is a translator from Polish. His translations have won the EBRD Literary Prize and the Asymptote Close Approximations Prize; and been shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, a National Jewish Book Award, the Sami Rohr Prize, and the National Translation Award. He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow and Translator-in-Residence at Princeton University. He is a Senior Consultant for the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), having previously served as Interim Executive Director. He lives in Philadelphia.