"I came late to WG Sebald, in the early summer of 2010, although I'd known of him for years. He was one of those surname-only authors whose works it seemed everyone else had read – or else he would crop up stuffily in the footnotes of a certain sort of book. So until I heard Will Self praising his work on the Today programme, he was simply a name on my to-do list. A task, you might say. Someone to read in hospital, if and when the time came.
But something about Self's enthusiasm persuaded me to buy The Rings of Saturn that lunchtime. Billed as an account of several days spent walking the Suffolk coast – territory I have known and loved since childhood – it ought to make perfect reading for the journey home to East Anglia that evening. And sure enough, as my train clattered and swayed across the shrinking peatlands, I found myself asking where this reluctant German had been all my life. ..."
Guardian: WG Sebald: Darkness on the edge of Anglia (Video)
New Yorker: Why You Should Read W. G. Sebald
NY Times: In the Company of Ghosts
YouTube: Patience (After Sebald), Adam Phillips on Sebald
2011 July: The Rings of Saturn - W.G. Sebald, 2015 February: ‘Drowned in a sea of salt’ Blake Morrison on the literature of the east coast
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