Günter Grass

Gunter Wilhelm Grass was a German novelist, poet, playwright and sculptor, born in 1927 in the Free City of Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland, who died in 2015. Drafted into the Waffen-SS at seventeen near the end of the Second World War and later held as a prisoner of war, he trained afterward as a stonemason and sculptor before turning to writing in the 1950s, repeatedly returning in his fiction to the Danzig of his childhood. He is best known for his 1959 debut novel The Tin Drum, a key text of European magic realism and the first book of his Danzig Trilogy, later adapted into a film that won the 1979 Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film; in 1999 the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature for what it called frolicsome black fables portraying the forgotten face of history.