Winfried Sebald was born on May 18, 1944, in Wertach, Bayern, Germany, and was one of three children of Rosa and Georg Sebald. From 1948 to 1963, he lived in Sonthofen. His father joined the Reichswehr in 1929 and remained in the Wehrmacht under the Nazis. His father remained a detached figure, a prisoner of war until 1947; a grandfather was the most important male presence in his early years.
Education
Winfried got his primary education at school in Oberstdorf. Sebald studied German and English literature first at the University of Freiburg and then at the University of Fribourg, where he received a degree in 1965. In 1973 he earned Doctor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia.
Winfried was a Lector at the University of Manchester from 1966 to 1969. He returned to St. Gallen in Switzerland for a year hoping to work as a teacher but could not settle. In 1970 he became a lecturer at the University of East Anglia. Sebald acquired habilitation from the University of Hamburg in 1986. In 1987, he was appointed to a chair of European literature at UEA. In 1989 he became the founding director of the British Centre for Literary Translation.
In his career as a scholar of German theater and literature, Sebald has also produced a number of nonfiction books. In 1996 his work "Die Ausgewanderten" was translated into English as "The Emigrants." This volume is the second in a series of books of fiction written by Sebald. Its 1990 predecessor," Schwindel, Gefuehle", is an autobiographical tale in which the narrator traverses four loosely related stories that occur at various times in European history. The third volume, "Ringe des Saturn: Eine Englische Wallfahrt", is more linear in its narration than the previous books in the series. In 1985, he published a collection of ten previously published essays on Austrian literature under the title "Die Beschreibung des Ungluecks: Zur Oesterreichischen Literatur von Stifter bis Handke." A second collection on the same subject, "Unheimliche Heimat: Essays zur Oesterreichischen Literatur", appeared in 1991. Sebald died in a car crash near Norwich in December 2001.