Novelist, poet, playwright and artist Günter Grass was born in the free city of Danzig (now part of Poland). He served in the German army during the Second World War and was captured and held by American forces. Upon his release, he worked as a miner and then studied in Berlin and Düsseldorf. From 1956 to 1959, Grass and his family lived in Paris, where he wrote TheTin Drum, which cast light on bourgeois complicity in the rise of National Socialism, together with a body of written work that earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999.

In addition to his writings and outspoken political activities, Grass was a talented artist, sculptor, and printmaker who illustrated many of this books and who designed their dust jackets. He died in Lübeck.