“International Booker Prize”: Jenny Erpenbeck is honored

International Booker Prize
Jenny Erpenbeck is honored

Jenny Erpenbeck can be happy about the “International Booker Prize”.

© imago/Uwe Meinhold

Jenny Erpenbeck is the first German author to win the International Booker Prize. Translator Michael Hofmann is also being celebrated.

Jenny Erpenbeck (57) and Michael Hofmann have won the 2024 International Booker Prize for Erpenbeck’s “personal and political” novel “Kairos”, which was translated by Hofmann. Erpenbeck is the first German writer to receive the prize, while Hofmann is the first male translator to win. The prize money of 50,000 pounds (about 58,500 euros) will be split equally between the two, say the organizers.

The International Booker Prize is awarded annually to the best single work of fiction translated into English and published in Great Britain or Ireland.

Destructive affair at the center of the novel

Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel “Kairos” is about a destructive affair between a young woman and an older man in East Berlin in the 1980s, against the backdrop of the fall of the GDR and the subsequent upheaval. The novel raises “complex questions about freedom, loyalty, love and power,” according to the description of the work on the website of the important British literary prize.

The novel is about a painful love affair and “the entanglement of personal and national changes,” said the jury chairwoman, Canadian writer Eleanor Wachtel (77), about the book, according to the British newspaper “The Guradian”.

Author Jenny Erpenbeck has received many awards

The author and director Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. In 1999 her novella “The Story of the Old Child” was published, which was followed by novels, stories and plays. The writer has already been honored with numerous awards, including the Thomas Mann Prize, the Uwe Johnson Prize, the Hans Fallada Prize and the Federal Cross of Merit with Ribbon.

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