Heinrich Theodor Böll was a German writer. Considered one of Germany's foremost post-World War II writers, Böll is a recipient of the Georg Büchner Prize (1967) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1972).
Alfred Hellmuth Andersch was a German writer, publisher, and radio editor. The son of a conservative East Prussian army officer, he was born in Munich, Germany and died in Berzona, Ticino, Switzerland. Martin Andersch, his brother, was also a writer.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1989.
Gerald Robert Vizenor is an American writer and scholar, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. Vizenor also taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Director of Native American Studies. With more than 30 books published, Vizenor is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.
Adam Hochschild is an American author, journalist, historian and lecturer. His best-known works include King Leopold's Ghost (1998), To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 (2011), Bury the Chains (2005), The Mirror at Midnight (1990), The Unquiet Ghost (1994), and Spain in Our Hearts (2016). American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (2022).
Gruppe 47 was a group of participants in German writers' meetings, invited by Hans Werner Richter between 1947 and 1967. The meetings served the dual goals of literary criticism as well as the promotion of young, unknown authors. In a democratic vote titled "Preis der Gruppe 47", it proved to be excellent for many who were beginning their writing careers. Group 47 had no organizational form, no fixed membership list, and no literary program, but was strongly influenced by Richter's invitations.
Jean Améry, born Hanns Chaim Mayer, was an Austrian-born essayist whose work was often informed by his experiences during World War II. His most celebrated work, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (1966), suggests that torture was "the essence" of the Third Reich. Other notable works included On Aging (1968) and On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death (1976). He first adopted the pseudonym Jean Améry in 1955. Améry died by suicide in 1978.
Peter Ulrich Weiss was a German writer, painter, graphic artist, and experimental filmmaker of adopted Swedish nationality. He is particularly known for his plays Marat/Sade and The Investigation and his novel The Aesthetics of Resistance.
Winfried Georg Sebald, known as W. G. Sebald or Max Sebald, was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was being cited by literary critics as one of the greatest living authors.
The Emigrants is a 1992 collection of narratives by the German writer W. G. Sebald. It won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize, and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal. The English translation by Michael Hulse was first published in 1996.
Vendela Vida is an American novelist, journalist, editor, screenplay writer, and educator. She is the author of multiple books, has worked as a writing teacher, and is a founder and editor of The Believer magazine.
Anthea Bell was an English translator of literary works, including children's literature, from French, German and Danish. These include The Castle by Franz Kafka, Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, the Inkworld trilogy by Cornelia Funke and the French Asterix comics with co-translator Derek Hockridge.
Eliot Weinberger is a contemporary American writer, essayist, editor, and translator. He is primarily known for his literary writings (essays) and political articles, the former characterized by their wide-ranging subjects and experimental style, verging on a kind of documentary prose poetry, and the latter highly critical of American politics and foreign policy. His work regularly appears in translation and has been published in more than thirty languages.
Allan Bérubé was a gay American historian, activist, independent scholar, self-described "community-based" researcher and college drop-out, and award-winning author, best known for his research and writing about homosexual members of the American Armed Forces during World War II. He also wrote essays about the intersection of class and race in gay culture, and about growing up in a poor, working-class family, his French-Canadian roots, and about his experience of anti-AIDS activism.
Vertigo is a 1990 novel and the first by the German author W. G. Sebald. The first of its four sections, titled 'Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet', is a short but conventional biography of Stendhal, who is referred to not by his pen name but by his birth name of Beyle. The second, 'All'estero', is a travelogue of two journeys made to the Alpine region by an unnamed narrator whose biography resembles Sebald's; an episode from the life of Casanova is also featured. The third, 'Dr K Takes the Waters at Riva', describes a difficult period in the life of Franz Kafka, referred to only as "Dr. K." Kafka's short story The Hunter Gracchus is re-told in summary form and the meaning of the hunter's ceaseless voyage interpreted by the narrator as Kafka's penitence for a longing for love. And the fourth, 'Il ritorno in patria', is a nostalgic recounting of the narrator's visit to his German hometown of "W," a rural village which he has seen nothing of for decades. The narrator recalls one of the town's residents, Hans Schlag the huntsman, who, falling to his death, suffers the same fate as the huntsman in Kafka's short story. Sebald makes notable use of leitmotif, such as sensations of dizziness as suggested in the title, and deceased persons lying covered on platforms. The novel functions along with Sebald's subsequent works The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn as a trilogy. All three works were translated into English by Michael Hulse in partnership with Sebald.
Xiaoze Xie is a Chinese-American visual artist and professor. He is based in Stanford, California, where Xie is currently the Paul L. & Phyllis Wattis Professor of Art at Stanford University. His art work includes painting, drawing, photography, installation, and video, the best-known of which are his monumental paintings of library books and newspapers, which explore the ephemeral nature of time, history and cultural memory.
Gert Ledig, full name Robert Gerhard Ledig, was a German writer.
Irène Heidelberger-Leonard is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. She was Professor of German Literature at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), where she taught for nearly 30 years, before she moved to London in 2009. She was married to Dick Leonard, the British writer and journalist, and is the mother of Mark Leonard, an expert on foreign policy, and Miriam Leonard, a classical scholar.
J. John Priola is a San Francisco-based contemporary visual artist and educator. He is known for photographic series capturing humble, generally inanimate subjects that explore human presence, absence and loss through visual metaphor. Priola's mature work can be broadly divided into earlier black-and-white, gelatin-silver series—formal elegant, painterly works largely focused on everyday objects and architectural details elevated to portraits—and later color series, which gradually shifted from architectural settings to detailed, varied explorations of the often-conflicted human relationship to nature. San Francisco Chronicle critic Kenneth Baker situated Priola's images "on the border between documentary and conceptual art," where they function as surveys of under-noticed details that "remind us how many potential questions, how much intimate domestic history, may lie embedded on the margins of our attention."
Michael Light is a San Francisco-based photographer and book maker whose work focuses on landscape, the environment, and American culture's relationship to both. He is known for aerial photographs of American western landscapes collectively titled "Some Dry Space: An Inhabited West" and for two archival projects focused on historical photographs of the Apollo lunar missions and U.S. atmospheric nuclear detonation tests, represented by the books Full Moon (1999) and 100 Suns (2003), respectively. Los Angeles Times critic Leah Ollman characterized his work as "largely about what we consider ours, how we act on that assumption, and what the visual manifestations of those claims look like ... [It] seduces and troubles in shifting measure."
