George Steiner

Francis George Steiner, FBA (April 23, 1929 – February 3, 2020) was a French and American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist and educator. He wrote extensively about the relationship between language, literature and society, as well as the impact of the Holocaust. A 2001 article in The Guardian described Steiner as a "polyglot and polymath".

To his admirers, Steiner is "among the great minds in today's literary world". He had an elder sister, Ruth Lilian, who was born in Vienna in 1922. Frederick Steiner had been a senior lawyer at Austria's central bank, the Oesterreichische Nationalbank;

Five years before Steiner's birth, his father had moved his family from Austria to France to escape the growing threat of anti-Semitism. He thought "Jews were endangered guests wherever they went, and wanted to equip his children [...] with languages to earn a living, the ability to pack a suitcase rather than a steamer trunk, and take joy in the adventure." His mother, for whom "self-pity was nauseating", Some disapproved of this charismatic "firebrand with a foreign accent" and Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University from 2001 to 2002.

Steiner was called "an intelligent and intellectual critic and essayist".

While Steiner generally took things very seriously, he also revealed an unexpected deadpan humor: when he was once asked if he had ever read anything trivial as a child, he replied, Moby-Dick.

Central to Steiner's thinking, he stated, "is my astonishment, naïve as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to love, to build, to forgive, and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate." for his views that racism is inherent in everyone and that tolerance is only skin deep. He is reported to have said: "It's very easy to sit here, in this room, and say 'racism is horrible'. But ask me the same thing if a Jamaican family moved next door with six children and they play reggae and rock music all day. Or if an estate agent comes to my house and tells me that because a Jamaican family has moved next door the value of my property has fallen through the floor. Ask me then!" His field was primarily comparative literature, and his work as a critic tended toward exploring cultural and philosophical issues, particularly dealing with translation and the nature of language and literature.

Steiner's first published book was Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in Contrast (1960), which was a study of the different ideas and ideologies of the Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Death of Tragedy (1961) originated as his doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford and examined literature from the ancient Greeks to the mid-20th century. His best-known book, After Babel (1975), was an early and influential contribution to the field of translation studies. It was adapted for television as The Tongues of Men (1977), and was the inspiration behind the creation in 1983 of the English avant-rock group News from Babel.

Works of literary fiction by Steiner include four short story collections, Anno Domini: Three Stories (1964), Proofs and Three Parables (1992), The Deeps of the Sea (1996), and A cinq heures de l'après-midi (2008); and his controversial novella, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (1981). Portage to San Cristobal, in which Jewish Nazi hunters find Adolf Hitler (the "A.H." of the novella's title) alive in the Amazon jungle thirty years after the end of World War II, explored ideas about the origins of European anti-semitism first expounded by Steiner in his critical work In Bluebeard's Castle (1971). Steiner has suggested that Nazism was Europe's revenge on the Jews for inventing conscience. Steiner's last book, A Long Saturday: Conversations, was written with Laure Adler; it was published in French in 2014 and in English in 2017. They married in 1955, the year he received his DPhil from Oxford University. Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur by the French Government (1984) The Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award by Stanford University (1998) Fellowship of the British Academy (1998) Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts Honorary Doctorate of Literature degrees from: University of East Anglia (1976) University of Leuven (1980) Mount Holyoke College (1983) Bristol University (1989) University of Glasgow (1990) University of Liège (1990) University of Ulster (1993) Durham University (1995) University of Salamanca (2002) Queen Mary University of London (2006) Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna (2006) Honoris Causa – Faculty of Letters – University of Lisbon (2009)

He has also won numerous awards for his fiction and poetry, including: Remembrance Award (1974) for Language and Silence: Essays 1958–1966. PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award (1992) for Proofs and Three Parables. PEN/Macmillan Fiction Prize (1993) for Proofs and Three Parables. JQ Wingate Prize for Non-Fiction (joint winner with Louise Kehoe and Silvia Rodgers) (1997) for No Passion Spent.