Claudio Magris

Claudio Magris was born in Trieste in 1939. He is a professor of German literature at the University of Trieste and a regular contributor to the newspaper "Corriere della Sera." He has translated works by Kleist, Ibsen, Schnitzler, and Büchner into Italian and has written studies on the works of Kafka, Musil, Hofmannsthal, Lukács, Joseph Roth, Rilke, Svevo, Canetti, Singer, and others. His seminal work, "Danube," was published in 1986. He was awarded the prize for the best foreign essay in France in 1990, the Erasmus Prize in the Netherlands in 2001 for his contribution to European culture, the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature (the Spanish-speaking Nobel) in 2004, and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2009.