The German writer Jenny Erpenbeck has been awarded the International Booker Prize for her novel “Kairos”. Together with her translator Michael Hofmann, she accepted the award on Tuesday evening in London. “I come from a family of authors. I feel very honored and wouldn’t be here without them,” she said in her acceptance speech.
Erpenbeck’s novel is about a destructive affair between a young woman and an older man in East Berlin in the 1980s – before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “Masterfully,” wrote the jury about “Kairos” when Erpenbeck was nominated for the shortlist, “she refracts generation-defining political events through the lens of a devastating love affair and thus questions the nature of fate and agency.”
Erpenbeck has previously been nominated for the prestigious British literary prize five times; this time the Swedish author Ia Genberg, the Argentinian Selva Almada, Hwang Sok-yong from South Korea, Jente Posthuma from the Netherlands and the Brazilian Itamar Vieira Junior were also on the shortlist.