Oskar Pastior

Born in 1927 into a Transylvanian Saxon family in Sibiu, Romania, he was deported to the Soviet Union as a forced labourer in 1945 and returned to Romania in 1949. After studying German literature in Bucharest, he emigrated to West Germany in 1968 and settled in Berlin, where he became the sole German member of the French literary group Oulipo. His poetry treats language as sonic material through anagrams, palindromes, and extreme formal constraint. He received the Georg Büchner Prize in 2006, the year of his death, and his wartime experiences inform Nobel laureate Herta Müller's novel The Hunger Angel.