Marianne Gilbert was born in Berlin in 1931 and emigrated to New York in 1939. Having worked as a college professor, a social worker and bookshop owner, she now teaches creative writing at a university for seniors in Saratoga Springs, where she also resides. Following the end of the war, her parents returned to Europe, where Robert began a second career as a lyricist of world-famous tunes such as Oh! My Pa-Pa! and as a translator of musicals like My Fair Lady, Hello Dolly and Annie Get Your Gun. Her mother Elisabeth (Elke) Gilbert was one of the most renowned translators from English into German; authors whose works she has translated include Carson McCullers, Dashiell Hammett, Harold Brodkey, Muriel Spark, Virginia Woolf and W.B. Yeats.