It’s the birthday of one of Germany’s most important novelists, Friedrich Christian Delius (b. 1943), who in 2011 won the Georg-Büchner Prize (Germany’s most prestigious literary award) and who should have more novels translated into English because they sound compelling.

(But why am I writing about a German novelist you’ve never heard of, you ask? Because nobody else was born today. Nobody. Except Georges Simenon, and you remember him from a year ago: he wrote the Inspector Maigret novels and a number of brilliant serious novels as well, couldn’t keep it zipped to save his life. Though to be fair, he didn’t really try.)

Delius was born in Rome but grew up in Germany in the state of Hesse. His father was a Lutheran pastor, and this religious background seems to show up thoughtfully in much of Delius’ work. He studied German literature at the Free University and the Technical University in Berlin. (NB: The Germans are a highly accomplished people but they don’t really shine at naming universities.) After graduating in 1970, he worked in publishing for about eight years. He has since written many novels, including Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman (2006), about a young pregnant German woman living in Rome in 1943 who starts out rather complacent in the sheltered German community she’s living with until she realizes her husband might never return from the war. The New York Times called it a “distinct and lovely novella,” and the entire work is rendered as one run-on sentence.

Some of Delius’ other novels include Ribbeck’s Pears (1991); The Sunday I Became World Champion (1994); My Year as a Murderer (2004), about a young man outraged by the acquittal in the late 1960s of a former Nazi judge responsible for hundreds of death sentences; The Woman for Whom I Invented the Computer (2010), which draws on the life of Konrad Zuse, who built the first functional computer; and The Pope’s Left Hand (2013), which describes the myriad fascinating thoughts of a German tour guide in Rome as he observes the Pope in a Protestant church. The only Delius novel available in English, as far as I can tell, is Portrait of the Mother.

Delius lives in Berlin and Rome. If you happen to travel to either city anytime soon, ask him from all of us to please get his novels translated.

Have a peaceful, entirely Nazi-free Wednesday (to review: Nazis are still the bad guys) and stay scrupulously honest to the data.