Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch was an Austrian nobleman, writer, and journalist, born on 27 January 1836. He gained renown for his romantic stories of Galician life. The term masochism is derived from his name, coined by his contemporary, the Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Sacher-Masoch did not approve of this use of his name.

During his lifetime, he was well known as a man of letters, in particular a utopian thinker who espoused socialist and humanist ideals in his fiction and non-fiction. Most of his works remain untranslated into English. The novel Venus in Furs is his only book commonly available in English.