Claudio Magris was born in Trieste (Italy) in 1939. He left his native Trieste at the age of eighteen to study at the University of Turin, where he specialised in Germanic Literature. He is now professor of this subject at the University of Trieste. He has published important studies on the relationship between Italian and Germanic cultures and on the importance of central Europe's cultural milieu, i.e. on German predominance over central European culture. His work translating Ibsen, Kleist and Schnitzler is also outstanding.

Claudio Magris is a versatile essayist and writer, and essays, novels and travelogues blend in his work, which emanates a passion for literature and an extraordinary ability to turn the literary essay into a work of art. The Hapsburg Myth in Modern Austrian Literature (Turin, 1963), Wilhelm Heinse (Trieste, 1968), Lontano da dove: Joseph Roth e la tradizione ebraico-oriental (Turin, 1971), Behind words (Milan, 1978), Ithaca and Beyond (Milan, 1982), Trieste. Un'identità di frontiera (Turin, 1982), L'Anello di Clarissa (Turin, 1984), Inferences on a Sabre (Pordenone, 1986), A Different Sea (1991), Microcosms, the 1998 Stega Prize, and The Exhibition (2002) figure outstandingly amongst his literary production. He won the Chianti Rufino-Antico Fattore International Award for The Danube (1986).

He has won the Juan Carlos I journalism award for an article he wrote called El titiritero de Madrid, published in the Corriere della Sera, which he regularly contributes to. He has also been awarded both the gold medal from Madrid's Círculo de Bellas Artes (2003) and the Erasmus Prize (2001).