Unknown author · Public domain

Born Paul Antschel, Celan survived forced labor under the Nazis while his parents were murdered in the Holocaust, and afterward chose to keep writing in German — the language of his family's killers — producing some of the most searching poetry to come out of that catastrophe. He settled in Paris, became a naturalized French citizen, and is regarded as one of the central figures of postwar German-language literature, known for a dense, elliptical style built from fractured, radically compressed language.