Jenny Erpenbeck’s “Kairos” is on the shortlist for the International Booker Prize. People here haven’t really noticed that she is considered the most important German writer in Great Britain and the USA. Let’s go.
She will probably soon receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. So within the next five years. In the German literary world one only suspects it, but US literary critics are already unanimously predicting it. On the book tables in American bookstores, if you notice German names at all, it is often theirs that catches your eye. And measured by the second most famous international literary prize, the International Booker Prize awarded in Great Britain, the most important living German-language writer is Jenny Erpenbeck anyway.