W. G. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944. His novels - 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 Award, the Berlin Literature Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize. He is also the author of three books of poems and a book-length essay. He died in December 2001.