10 Facts About Siegfried Lenz

Siegfried Lenz won the 2010 International Nonino Prize in Italy.

Siegfried Lenz was born in Lyck, East Prussia, the son of a customs officer.

However Lenz subsequently said he had been included in a collective 'joining' of the Party without his knowledge.

Siegfried Lenz then worked as an interpreter for the British army.

Siegfried Lenz's studies were cut off early when he became an intern for the daily newspaper Die Welt, where he served as an editor from 1950 to 1951.

In 1951, Siegfried Lenz used the money he had earned from his first novel, Habichte in der Luft, to finance a trip to Kenya.

In 2003, Siegfried Lenz joined the Verein fur deutsche Rechtschreibung und Sprachpflege to protest against the German orthography reform of 1996.

Siegfried Lenz died at the age of 88 on 7 October 2014 in Hamburg.

In 1988 Siegfried Lenz was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, a prize given annually at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

The Siegfried Lenz Prize is a literary prize awarded every two years in Hamburg by the Siegfried Lenz Foundation.