W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgau, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and 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 previously translated books--"The Rings of Saturn," "The Emigrants," "Vertigo," and "Austerlitz"--have won a number of international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the "Los Angeles Times" Book Awar...