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.
Facts
AwardNobel Prize in Literature (1999) 1 Classification
Original Language Connections
In the Other Atlases
- Also in Geography Atlas: Germany, nationality there.
- Also in Language Atlas: German, original language there.
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Günter Grass
Lead section, first sentence, birth date
16 October 1927
Early life
Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig on 16 October 1927
Lead section, first sentence, death date
13 April 2015
Death
A pipe smoker for most of his adult life, Grass died at the age of 87 of a lung infection on 13 April 2015 in a Lübeck hospital.
Awards and honours
In 1999, the Swedish Academy awarded Grass the Nobel Prize in Literature, praising him as a writer 'whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history'.
Original language statement
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.
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