Peter Kurzeck: Novelist compared by some to Proust whose work explored the facts of his own life with childlike intensity

Kurzeck: his family had been wartime refugees from Bohemia (EPA)

Peter Kurzeck is regarded by many as Germany's greatest unsung writer of his generation. In 2008, when Die Zeit canvassed opinion on which authors should be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Kurzeck's name came up most often, and he has been compared to Marcel Proust, among others.

Born in Bohemia in 1943, he was inspired for the greater part of his work by the events of his own life, in novels like Kein Fruhling ("No spring") and Keiner stirbt (No one dies"). In 2002 he told an audience at the International Literature Festival in Berlin: "At quite an early age, I gave in to the irresistible urge not to forget anything because everything that we cannot remember may be lost forever. If we know nothing of yesterday, yesterday never was, neither was Bohemia, and neither were we."

His family moved to Germany as refugees in 1946 and Kurzeck was raised in Staufenberg. He began writing as a young man and had work published in local newspapers and magazine. He became an apprenticeship in a grocer's shop and at 28 became head of personnel for a US army department, but gave it up to write full-time, moving in 1977 to Frankfurt.

The literary website andotherstories.org summed up his work: "His books are a flow of memories, sensations and associations. A poetic story unfolds, whether on the subject of his childhood village or the hustle and bustle of a big city. His amazed and bemused dwelling on the details of life, which he does with childlike intensity, is the reason his books burst with a delight in people, places and foods. And yet they are also sad – the literary equivalent of the blues."

CHRIS MAUME

Peter Kurzeck, writer: born Tachau, Bohemia 10 June 1943; died Frankfurt 25 November 2013.