W. G. Sebald - or Max, as he is known to friends and colleagues - was born in 1944 in Wertach in the Allgäu. He first came to England as a Lektor at the University of Manchester and after a brief return to Germany and Switzerland was appointed in 1970 to a post at the University of East Anglia, where he remains as Professor of European Literature.

Sebald's earliest works of literary criticism, on Sternheim (1969) and Döblin (1980), were followed by an edited volume on German theatre in the 1970s and 1980s and by two volumes of essays on Austrian literature, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks in 1985 and Unheimliche Heimat in 1991, the first more focused on the psychological, the second on the social determinants of writing. In similar vein, the beautifully illustrated Logis in einem Landhaus. Über Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Robert Walser und andere came out in 1998. In between came Nach der Natur. Ein Elementargedicht (1988) and Schwindel. Gefühle. (1990). The former offers a meditation on the progressive destruction of nature mediated through a triptych of reflections in rhymeless verse on the Master of the Isenheim Altar, Matthias Grünewald (1470-1528), on the explorer and botanist Georg Wilhelm Steller, son of a cantor, who in 1736 took part in Vitus Bering's Alaska expedition, and finally on the travels of the author himself through time and space. A similarly loosely associative collection of prose essays, Schwindel. Gefühle. tells of travellers in Austria and Italy including Henri Beyle (a.k.a. Stendhal), Kafka, and, in two essays, the author himself, whose second journey is a return to his birthplace and its past.

Sebald's highly individual style emerges fully in Die Ausgewanderten. Vier lange Erzählungen (1992) and Die Ringe des Saturn. Eine englische Wallfahrt (1995) as the author, become listener, travels through space and time in the memories of those he encounters on his own travels. The experience of exile and the fate of Europe's Jews are the ever-revisited themes. In 1997 Sebald's lecture at Zurich University on 'Luftkrieg und Literatur', published as a book in 1999, unleashed a still continuing controversy over the taboo subject of the destruction of Germany's cities in the Allied bombing raids, a literary taboo which Sebald, as a German author who has lived in England for thirty years, is uniquely qualified to break.

The appearance of Austerlitz, with its quite unmistakable personal style, in February of this year confirms W. G. Sebald as one of the greatest writers of his generation. Austerlitz too, like the earlier volumes, traces the 'Schmerzensspuren, die sich, wie er [Austerlitz] zu wissen behauptete, in unzähligen feinen Linien durch die Geschichte ziehen'.