Günter Grass

Günter Grass was born in 1927 in Danzig. After being released as a prisoner of war by the USA he finished a stonemason apprenticeship and studied Graphic Arts and Sculpture in Düsseldorf and Berlin. In 1956 he published his first book of poetry accompanied by drawings, followed in 1959 by his debut novel The Tin Drum, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. Grass, a quarrelsome intellectual, who again and again took part in political and social debates, is considered one of the foremost German language authors. Günter Grass died in 2015 in Lübeck.