W. G. Sebald

Sebald grew up in a small Bavarian village in the silence that followed the war, unaware for years of what his own father, a Wehrmacht soldier, had witnessed or done; that unspoken history became his lifelong subject. He left Germany for academic posts in Switzerland and England, settling at the University of East Anglia in 1970 and staying there as a professor of European literature for the rest of his life.

He came to fiction late and wrote slowly: Vertigo, The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995), and Austerlitz (2001) blend memoir, travelogue, and invented biography, illustrated throughout with uncaptioned photographs that blur documentary and fiction. He was being spoken of as a future Nobel candidate when he died in December 2001, killed instantly in a car crash near Norwich apparently caused by an aneurysm.