Emigrants, The

Description: At first 'The Emigrants' appears simply to document the lives of four Jewish emigres in the twentieth century. But gradually, as Sebald's precise, almost dreamlike prose begins to draw their stories, the four narrations merge into one overwhelming evocation of exile and loss. Written with a bone-dry sense of humour and a fascination with the oddness of existence 'The Emigrants' is highly original in its heady mix of fact, memory and fiction and photographs. Author Biography: W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgau, 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.