The Call of the Toad

Günter Grass was a German-Kashubian novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Trained as a stonemason and sculptor, Grass began writing in the 1950s. In his fiction, he frequently returned to his birthplace of Danzig.

Grass is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum, a key text in European magic realism. It was the first book of his Danzig Trilogy, the other two being Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. His works are frequently considered to have a left-wing political dimension, and Grass was an active supporter of the Social Democratic Part of Germany. The Tin Drum was adapted as a film of the same name, which won both the 1979 Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film. In 1999, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, praising him as a writer "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history".