The Emigrants

Strange, beautiful and terribly moving * A.S. Byatt *This deeply moving book shames most writers with its nerve and tact and wonder * Michael Ondaatje *An unconsoling masterpiece…It is exquisitely written and exquisitely translated…a true work of art * Spectator *A spellbinding account of four Jewish exiles. Its restrained and meditative tone has stayed with me all year * Nicholas Shakespeare *A sober delicate account of displacement, and a classic of its kind. Modest and remote, it resurrects older standards of behaviour, making most contemporary writing seem brash and immature. No book has pleased me more this year * Anita Brookner, Spectator *It’s like nothing I’ve ever read…A book of excruciating sobriety and warmth and a magical concreteness of observation…I know of no book which conveys more about that complex fate, being a European at the end of European civilization. I know of few books written in our time but this one which attains the sublime * Susan Sontag, Times Literary Supplement *The writing seems long distilled, intensely pre-mediated and yet utterly fresh. It has an unaffected earnestness, a loner’s earnestness * Karl Miller, Times Literary Supplement *One of the most innovative writers of the late 20th century… It’s as if the spirit of ruined Europe were speaking through him * Guardian *The writer who above all others transformed the ravaged lands and minds of post-war Europe into a scene of hauntings * Independent *

W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allg u, in the Bavarian Alps, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1966 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester, settling permanently in England in 1970. He was professor of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia, and is the author of The Emigrants which won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. W. G. Sebald died in 2001.