W. G. Sebald

W. G. Sebald was a German writer and academic, long resident in England, whose unclassifiable books — blending fiction, memoir, history, and photography — made him one of the most original and admired literary voices of the late 20th century before his death in 2001.

Winfried Georg Sebald left Germany for England in the 1960s and spent his career teaching European literature at the University of East Anglia, writing in German even as he made his home abroad. In a remarkable late flowering, he produced a handful of books — The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, and Austerlitz — that defied categorization, weaving together fiction, memoir, travel writing, history, and grainy black-and-white photographs into a single hypnotic, melancholy flow.

Circling obsessively around memory, exile, decay, and the catastrophes of the twentieth century — above all the Holocaust — Sebald’s work is written in long, flowing, intricately subordinated sentences of grave beauty. Austerlitz (2001), his only conventional novel, is widely regarded as his masterpiece.

Sebald died in a car accident in 2001, at the height of his powers and often mentioned as a future Nobel laureate. His small, profound body of work continues to influence writers and to be discovered by readers drawn to its singular vision of history and memory.