Discover the Best Books Written by W.G. Sebald

Winfried Georg Sebald (18 May 1944 – 14 December 2001), known as W. G. Sebald or (as he preferred) Max Sebald, was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was being cited by literary critics as one of the greatest living authors. Sebald was born in Wertach, Bavaria, the second of the three children of Rosa and Georg Sebald and his parent's only son. From 1948 to 1963, he lived in Sonthofen.

 His father joined the Reichswehr in 1929 and remained in the Wehrmacht under the Nazis. His father remained a detached figure, a prisoner of war until 1947: his maternal grandfather, the small-town police officer Josef Egelhofer (1872–1956), was the most important male presence during his early years. Sebald was shown images of The Holocaust while at school in Oberstdorf and recalled that no one knew how to explain what they had just seen. 

The Holocaust and post-war Germany are central themes in his work. Sebald studied German and English literature first at the University of Freiburg and then at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, where he received a degree in 1965. He was a Lector at the University of Manchester from 1966 to 1969. He returned to St. Gallen in Switzerland for a year, hoping to work as a teacher but could not settle. 

Sebald married his Austrian-born wife, Ute, in 1967. In 1970 he became a lecturer at the University of East Anglia (UEA). There, he completed his Ph.D. in 1973 with a dissertation entitled The Revival of Myth: A Study of Alfred Döblin's Novels. Sebald acquired habilitation from the University of Hamburg in 1986. In 1987, he was appointed as a chair of European literature at UEA. In 1989 he became the founding director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. He lived at Wymondham and Poringland while at UEA.