Alexander Starritt

Alexander Starritt is a British author and journalist. He studied at the University of Oxford and has worked as a journalist and editor. He is the author of the novel We Germans (2020), a short but extraordinarily concentrated work presented as a letter written by a German grandfather to his half-English grandson, in which the grandfather reflects on his service as a Wehrmacht soldier on the Eastern Front during World War II and the moral compromises it entailed. We Germans was widely praised for its restraint, its moral intelligence, and its achievement in inhabiting a perspective—that of an ordinary German soldier—that is difficult to write about without either condemnation or excuse. The novel won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction in 2021 and the Betty Trask Prize. It has been described as a significant contribution to the literature of historical reckoning and intergenerational guilt. Starritt is also the translator of several books from German. He lives in the United Kingdom.