George Steiner

Polymath, author, teacher, and intellectual

George Steiner has been credited with redefining the role of the critic. As a Jewish European who escaped Paris one month before the German occupation began in 1940, he has written extensively on the Holocaust throughout his career.

Steiner was elected an Extraordinary Fellow at Cambridge in 1969, and has gone on to hold similarly prestigious positions at the universities of Oxford, Columbia, and Geneva. He is also an avowed generalist, insisting that true understanding comes from being literate in both the arts and science. He has written numerous books, of which After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975), is often considered to be the most influential.