German · 1944–2001
W.G. Sebald left Germany for England in his twenties and spent his career teaching at the University of East Anglia, writing prose works that defy easy categorization. Part memoir, part history, part fiction, his books—The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz—wander through landscapes haunted by violence and loss, particularly the Holocaust. His distinctive method combines meandering prose with grainy black-and-white photographs whose relationship to the text remains uncertain. The effect is spectral: history seeps through every sentence. He wrote in German but oversaw English translations closely, creating works that feel native to neither language. His death in a car accident in 2001, just as international recognition arrived, cut short a body of work that had begun transforming how literature engages with memory and trauma.