Austrian-British fiction writer.
As an 11-year old boy from a Jewish family, he left Austria after the Anschluss (his parents had immigrated to Palestine before Germany annexed Austria), found temporary refuge in Holland, and succeeded in surviving inside Nazi Germany by assuming a Dutch identity: that of Jan Gerrit Overbeek. During this time, he worked on a barge in the Rhine, transporting goods between Holland and Germany.
In 1945, Jan Gerrit Overbeek became Jakov Chaklan, and he made his way to Haifa. After a literary apprenticeship, a marriage, and the birth of a son, he moved to Vienna for three years. Finally, in 1954, he settled in London, where he wrote, in German, the short stories and novels on which his stature as a major European writer is based: Soul of Wood, Landscape in Concrete, and Ergo. Lind began writing in English and the autobiography Counting My Steps was the first book written in his new language.
His stories have been translated into English, German, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Finnish, Spanish, Hungarian, and Czech. His work been adapted into plays, operas, and films. A collection of essays about his life and writings has also been published, Writing After Hitler: the Work of Jakov Lind (2001). He died on 16 February 2007 in London.
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