Günter Grass

Nobel Prize in Literature 1999

Günter Grass was born in Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) on October 16, 1927, and died in Lübeck, Germany, on April 13, 2015. A writer, poet, playwright, essayist, and painter, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999, becoming one of the most important contemporary German authors. In 1959, his novel The Tin Drum This gave him international notoriety, while simultaneously triggering a heated debate in German circles about the war and the Nazi legacy. It was adapted for film by director Volker Schlöndorff, winning the 1979 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Grass, with his sensual and humorous writing, sometimes appealing to fantasy and surrealist delirium, is also the author of other remarkable titles such as The Rat, The Cat and the Mouse, Writing After Auschwitz, Cancer Steps, On a Journey from One Germany to Another, My Century, Peeling the Onion, The Box, The Nailed and On Finitude.