The annual Sebald Lecture is organised by the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT), based at the University of East Anglia (UEA), in association with the Society of Authors and supported by the Times Literary Supplement (TLS).

The event on January 11 at Kings Place will celebrate 20 years of the BCLT, Britain’s leading centre for the development, promotion and support of literary translation. The centre was founded by WG ‘Max’ Sebald and honours his vision by promoting new work in new languages.

The Sebald Lecture also celebrates the best in contemporary translation, with the presentation of the annual Literary Translation Prizes. Presented before the lecture by Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the TLS, they are awarded to outstanding translators for work published during 2009.

It is 10 years since the BCLT started alternating lectures on the art of literary translation - speakers have included Seamus Heaney, Susan Sontag, Carlos Fuentes, Germaine Greer and Louis de Bernières - with lectures on Sebald’s own work, given by authors including Sebald himself, Claudio Magris, Marina Warner, and now Will Self.

“The aim of the lecture is to raise the profile of international writing and literary translation and to address Sebald’s work, as he would himself, within a European tradition and touching on many different themes and disciplines. In other words on translatability, whether into another language or moving from the verbal to the visual, with Sebald’s inclusion of images in his books,” said Prof Amanda Hopkinson, BCLT director.

Born in Germany, Sebald taught at UEA from 1970 until his death in a car accident in 2001, aged 57. Works such as The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz, The Emigrants and On the Natural History of Destruction were termed ‘prose-fiction’ by the author because of their deliberate blurring of fact and fiction. He also composed two volumes of poetry, For Years Now and Unrecounted, and translated more with his close friend, the poet Michael Hamburger.

Since his untimely death Sebald has become a cult figure and the word ‘Sebaldian’ has been coined for the genre he exemplified - a unique mix of history, fiction, myth, landscape, travel, autobiography and photography, most often known as Psychogeography.

Will Self, whose work recognises Sebald’s influence, is the author of seven novels, four novellas and five collections of shorter fiction, all of which have been extensively translated. His novel How the Dead Live was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award, he won the Geoffrey Faber Award for his first short story collection, and the Wodehouse Prize for his last novel The Butt. He has also received the Aga Khan Award for Fiction. He has worked as a journalist for many publications and is a frequent broadcaster on television and radio.

Commenting on his lecture, ‘Absent Jews and Invisible Executioners: WG Sebald and the Holocaust’, Self said: “WG Sebald's novels are almost unique among the narrative fiction written by non-Jewish Germans in the postwar period for their depiction of the lives of Jews affected by the Holocaust, but to what extent was Sebald's approach to the Holocaust itself symptomatic of a deeper and intransigent form of denial?

“In this lecture I will analyse Sebald's Holocaust writing in the light of the evolving historical understanding of the Holocaust and the part the German people took in it. I will ask whether, when it comes to such crimes against humanity, it is possible for there to be a literature either by or about the perpetrators, and what purpose such writings might fulfil?”

The event on Monday January 11 starts at 7pm with the presentation of the 2009 Literary Translation Prizes, followed by The Sebald Lecture. Tickets priced £9.50 are available online at www.kingsplace.co.uk, or priced £11.50 from the Kings Place Box Office, call 020 7520 1490.