Campo Santo

Campo Santo is a collection of essays by W. G. Sebald

When W.G. Sebald died tragically in 2001 a unique voice was silenced. Campo Santo is a collection of the pieces he left behind – none of them previously published in book form – which provide a powerful insight into the themes that came to dominate his life.

Four pieces pay tribute to Corsica, weaving elegiacally between past and present. Sebald also examines the works of writers such as Kafka, Nabokov, and Günter Grass, showing both how literature can provide restitution for the injustices of the world and how such literature came to have so great an influence on him. Campo Santo is a fitting memorial to W.G. Sebald, who himself studied the shifting nature of memory and time with such sensitivity.

‘A precious addition to the canon’ Independent

‘Will come to be seen as indispensable to an understanding of his work’ Sunday Times

‘Full of a sense of liberation and lightness … these [pieces] abound in energy and work the authentic Sebaldian magic’ Literary Review

‘We have become suspicious, rightly, of claims for literary greatness, but in Sebald’s case the claim was triumphantly justified. He was, he is, the real thing’ John Banville, Guardian

‘Sebald was probably the greatest intellect and voice of the late twentieth century’ Anthony Beevor, The Times

‘A writer whose explorations of time and memory make him arguably the closest author modern European letters has to rival Borges’ Sunday Times

W . G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944 and died in December 2001. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1996 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester and settled permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia and is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Campo Santo, Unrecounted, For Years Now and A Place in the Country. His selected poetry is published in a volume called Across the Land and the Water.