Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

[2] In Norway, Boschwitz wrote his first novel, Menschen neben dem Leben (People Alongside Life), which was first published in Swedish, under the pseudonym John Grane, as Människor utanför, in 1937.

[3][4] The revised and re-released edition was a massive success, being translated into over 20 languages and entering The Sunday Times's top ten list of best selling hardbacks more than 80 years after it was originally published.

[3] When World War II broke out, Boschwitz and his mother were arrested by the British, classified as "enemy aliens", and interned on the Isle of Man.

On the voyage there, on the HMT Dunera, a crew member threw the only draft of his latest work, Das Grosse Fressen (The Big Feast), into the ocean.

[4] Posthumously, following the 2021 re-publication of Der Reisende, Boschwitz has been compared favourably to John Buchan, Franz Kafka,[5] Thomas Mann, Heinrich Böll, and Hans Fallada.

Boschwitz left behind the manuscript of King Winter's Birthday: A Fairy Tale, dreaming of the plot while held on the Isle of Man; the unpublished handwritten work, along with illustrations by Ulrich's mother Martha Ella, had lain undisturbed in a New York archive for eighty years.

On November 14, 2024, Pushkin Press published Freedman's translation of Boschwitz's manuscript as King Winter's Birthday, with illustrations by British artist Emily Sutton.