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  • Published: 4 March 2004
  • ISBN: 9780140298000
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $29.99

On the Natural History of Destruction



W. G. Sebald has become one of the most admired European writers

In the last years of World War II, the Allies dropped a million tons of bombs on Germany. Yet the German people have been silent about the resulting devastation and loss of life, failing to recognise the terrible shadow that destruction from the air cast over their land. Here W. G. Sebald, one of the most brilliant writers of the twentieth century, asks why it is we turn our backs on the horrors of war, and, in addressing our response to the past, bravely offers insights into how we live now.

  • Published: 4 March 2004
  • ISBN: 9780140298000
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $29.99

About the author

W. G. Sebald

W G Sebald (Author)
W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, in the Bavarian Alps, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1966 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester, settling permanently in England in 1970. He was professor of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia, and is the author of The Emigrants which won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. W. G. Sebald died in 2001.

Michael Hulse and Simon Rae (Translators)
Michael Hulse teaches poetry at Warwick University and regularly does reading tours in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India. He is based in Warwick. Simon Rae is a playwright , novelist and broadcaster (he presented Radio 4's 'Poetry Please' for several years). He lives in Banbury, Oxfordshire. Both Michael Hulse and Simon Rae are published poets and winners of the National Poetry Competition.

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