Campo Santo (Modern Library Paperbacks) (23 page)

W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and in Manchester. He taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming professor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His previous books—
After Nature, The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants, Vertigo
, and
Austerlitz
—have won a number of international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the
L.A. Times
Book Award, the Berlin Literature Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize. He died in December 2001.

Anthea Bell was born in Suffolk and educated at Somerville College, Oxford. She has worked as a translator for many years, primarily from German and French, and her translations include works of nonfiction (biography, politics, social history, musicology, and art history), literary and popular fiction, and classic German works for young people. Anthea Bell has also served on the committee of the Translators Association and the jury panel of the Schlegel-Tieck German translation prize in the U.K., and has received a number of translation prizes and awards, including, in 2002, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (U.K.) and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize (U.S.) for W. G. Sebald’s
Austerlitz
. She lives in Cambridge, England.