And then there were these couple of boxes kicking around that just had the word “Max” written on them. “There were just hundreds and hundreds of those green storage crates, and it took me two to three years to unpack them all and try and work out what they were. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Caird Collection The Burning of the Royal James at the Battle of Solebay.

He remembers almost fifteen years ago discovering two boxes marked ‘Max’ when he was unpacking the university’s photographic collection of over one million photographs, which had been boxed during a refurbishment. There are many elements to Sebald’s book, but for Weaver it’s the photographs that were the starting point. Together with manuscripts from the family and Sebald’s own photographs, the exhibition pulls together the threads of Sebald’s enigmatic text to present its own uniquely poetic visual portrait of East Anglia. It brings together many fascinating manuscripts and objects – from collections in Norwich Castle and other local museums across East Anglia that Sebald visited for his influential work.

And like the book it follows the traces of the author’s physical and metaphysical wanderings – taking in everything from the mystery of Sir Thomas Browne’s skull and the secret landscapes of the Cold War to the ghostly vessels of vanished herring fleets and intricate pattern books of the Norwich silk weavers. The exhibition which Warr curated with Dr Rosy Gray of Norwich Castle Museum is an aptly idiosyncratic homage to Sebald and his ‘local book’. And if they can read it, they can’t understand it.” “Every time anybody starts work at the university it’s almost a kind of rite of passage to give them a copy ,” he adds, “and it’s really peculiar to have a famous local writer who writes in a language that most people can’t read.

Warr is co-editor of Shadows of Reality: A Catalogue of WG Sebald’s Photographic Material (Norwich: Boiler House Press, 2019) and the Curator of Photographic Collections at the UEA, which holds many of Sebald’s photographs. “So it’s odd that it’s held in such high esteem academically and internationally because it’s a kind of a local book, it’s by a local author, and yet he’s a very strange local author.”

“It’s a book that has got a very peculiar readership and fan base, because there’s lots of Sebald fans out there,” says Dr Nick Warr, who co-curated this homage to Sebald. WG Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (Sizewell – Unused Photograph).

The rings of saturn by wg sebald