Novelist, poet and artist Günter Grass, whose controversial writings were based in the telling of twentieth-century German history, has died in hospital, age 87. Grass’s best known novel is The Tin Drum (1959), about a boy who decides never to grow up, but he also wrote about social justice, sexual politics and the environment.
An obituary in The Guardian highlights how Grass’s honest approach to writing about the passions of youth and national pride, within the context of German history, garnered both criticism and praise, but didn’t prevent his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999 and becoming an international bestseller.
13 April 2015
